Sour Heart - A Collection of Short Stories by Jenny Zhang (2017)

Website of Jenny Zhang.

My post upon “Why Are They Throwing Bricks” by Jenny Zhang

Very Insightful Review by Jia Tolentino from The New Yorker 

I offer my great thanks to Max u for the Amazon Gift Card that enabled my reading of Sour Heart .

I love short Stories.  To me reading them well is more of a challenge than reading a novel, many practitioners says writing them is harder.  

My first and near last word on Jenny Zhang’s collection of short stories Sour Heart is that this is an amazing, beautiful, deeply intelligent and sublime work of art, her first and just published.  The review by Jia Tolentino, linked to above, surpasses anything I could produce here so I shall keep my post brief.

There are eight stories in the collection, all are about the experiences of young Chinese girls, immigrated to America.  The longest story in the collection, reading times range from 30 to sixty minutes, is set during the cultural revolution in China.  The description of the horrible cruelty directed at members of the varying narrator’s families is beyond painful in detail.  (I recently did an editorial post in which I said terrorists, dictators, demagogues,  throughout history, for sure now in America, have waged a war on those of us in the reading life, Zhang let me see how directly this was true of Maoist China in her partially set in China story.  I thank her for this.)   

The opening story, “We Love You, Chrispina” is narrated by a young girl.  With her parents, she lives in a place in New York City so filthy that they wake each morning covered in roaches.  In a very long sentence whose scatology  might make Swift blush, we are given a very vivid account of the difficulty of elimination in this environment.  The final story is also narrated by Chrispina.

The families are intensely close in these stories.  The parents , though far from perfect, are totally devoted to their daughter and her brother.  They begin in grinding poverty.  In one harrowing scene the father eats what his daughter vomits as they can waste nothing.  It is also something that will, we can only predict, be thrown in her face one day.  The parents have terrible fights, fathers may work three jobs while going to Night school to take care of his family but he also savagely beats his wife and flaunts his girlfriend.  There are some delightfully fun, if you have a twisted sense of humour, stories about the very multicultural school experiences of the girl.  Every ethnic group is represented, something to offend everyone.  There is an incredibly cruel amazing beautiful 12 year old Korean girl that is destined to ruin many lives.  We see adolescent curiosity about sex, trying to figure it out.  The girls are just beginning to get their periods and develop breasts.  

In some of the stories the families have moved up in the world, in another they are in North Carolina.  The Chinese immigrants community is mutually supportive, though there is intense drama and rivalry. The family dynamics are just brilliant.  There is much more in the collection than I have mentioned.  The sentences are just so marvellous.

I truly loved Sour Heart.  

In a podcast  Zhang expresses her great admiration for Zadie Smith, Clarice Lispector (yes) and Marguerite Duras.

Mel u