It’s tempting to chalk this up to shared cultural experience, to say that I saw myself in one story’s self-destructive Chinese American teenager on a hot May night in Texas, or my parents in another story’s newly immigrated couple grimly reinventing themselves over green bean casserole, or my grandparents in the shadows and silences created by the Cultural Revolution in these stories. But this would be facile and untrue. I felt this way because Zhang is a master of character and interiority, what it is to be a person: every gesture and perception colored by a lifetime of memory, the privacy and singularity of the mind, the irreducible multitudes contained within. This is a debut with the subtlety, confidence, and range of a seasoned writer. When these characters speak past each other, when they confound and misunderstand each other, when the story they tell isn’t the story that’s heard, when they look in the same direction and each see something completely different, I felt so acutely that impassable gulf between bodies, that unknowability, even as I marveled at literature’s capacity—and, more specifically, Zhang’s gift as a writer—to transcend it.
The opening story, "The Subject," about a young artist who interviews and paints her elderly roommate, deals directly with questions of representation— whose images and stories are considered worthy of artistic attention and who gets to tell those stories. Did those questions inform the writing of The Sorrows of Others more broadly? What was the significance of having this story as the first one the reader encounters?
This story is from the July - August 2023 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the July - August 2023 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
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