“There Was No Creek and I am Still Alive” - A Short Story by Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart

Webpage of Jenny Zhang - Lots of Links including one to Today’s Story

Jenny Zhang on The Reading Life

Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang’s collection of short stories centring on young female Chinese immigrants living in The United States, is showing up on numerous Best Books of 2017 lists.  Were I to publish such a list on The Reading Life, for sure it would be included.

In December I have a Mini Short Story Project.  My goal is to post upon four Yiddish Short Stories and four 21st Century Stories by Americans.

Today’s American story could be right out of The Headlines, immigrants, pedophiles, social media controversies, the collapsing of the Family are all central to the story.  Our plot begins when the narrator, on the cusp of puberty when we first encounter her, is the daughter of Chinese immigrants now living in America.  We follow up to fifteen.  Her father is at first very protctive, he worries she will either drown in a creek or be murdered by grown men she meets online.  She has sex limited to touching with them and one of her teachers, her favorite one.  By now her father has left the family, living out on The street.   The scene in which the girl sees him and he apparently does not know her was very moving.

Her mother seems clueless about her daughter’s sexual activities.  

This is a very well done disturbing story.  It rings with truth.

I hope to follow Zhang for a long time.

Jenny Zhang, 33, was born in Shanghai and raised in New York. She is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction. She has two published collections of poetry, Hags and Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, for which Zhang was compared to “a 21st-century Whitman, only female, Chinese, and profoundly scatological”. Sour Heart, a collection of short stories about New York’s Chinese American community largely told from the point of view of young girls, is the first book published by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s Lenny imprint at Random House in the US.

Mel u

“Settling” - A Short Story by Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart - August 14, 2015

“Settling” by Jenny Zhang May Be Read Here

An Interesting Q and A with Jenny Zhang, from Powell’s Books

Jenny Zhang on The Reading Life

Recently I read and loved Sour Heart, the debut collection of short stories by Jenny Zhang, mostly on young women who have not long ago moved from China to New York City.  I hope to be able to follow her literary career for a long time.  

I was happy to find one of her stories, “Settling”, readable online.  I’m getting behind in my posting and am mostly focusing on German language  Literature this month,  so I will keep my post short.  As the title suggests, it is about how,in this case  Lillian, doing nude massages free lance after quitting her massage parlour job while fancying herself a serious modern poet, and her mother. talk about how women settle for the men in their lives. Set in China, the mother talks  to her daughter about her own romantic history and that of Lillian’s aunt.   As I expected the conversations are sparkling.  The mother/daughter relationship is very well done.

I am glad I read this story.  

Avant Bousweau 

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

"Why Were They Throwing Bricks?" - A Short Story by Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart (2017)

Website of Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart

"MY GRANDMOTHER CAME BACK two years later. I was in middle school, and my pathetic puberty struck like a flash of lightning in the middle of the night — I suddenly saw all my surroundings for what they were: hideous and threatening. I had no friends, social life, interests, talents, breasts, straight teeth, likability, normal clothes, or charm, and every day I came home weighed down with dread. I started to fake illnesses so I could stay home with my 2-year-old brother. I followed him around everywhere, crawling when he crawled and walking on my knees when he learned to walk so that we were the same height.

When my grandmother moved in for the second time, she told us that this time she wasn’t leaving. She was going to apply for a green card and raise my brother until he was old enough to be on his own — 18, maybe 19.

“We’ll see about that,” my father said in Chinese, and then to me and my mother in English, “Let Grandma believe what she wants to believe. My gut says we’ll be back at the travel agency in March, or my name is not Daddy, problem solver of this house.” From "Why Were They Throwing Bricks" by Jenny Zhang

Jenny Zhang's debut collection of linked short stories centering on young women from Shanghai recently immigrated to America, Sour Heart, is being raved about all over the literary press.  I was delighted to find on her beautiful website a short story narrated by a young female immigrant from Shanghai living in New York City area with her parents and younger brother, over several years of her life, centering around her relationship with her grandmother.

I'm very much suggesting all lovers of the short story read "Why Were They Throwing Bricks" (you will find the story on her website linked above) so I will just keep this post mercifully brief. This story is included in her collection.

The narrator and her grandmother are very close, as a very young girl in Shanghai, she slept in her grandmother's bed.  The grandmother moves to America four separate times.  On one occasion she reluctantly returns to China to stay with her husband while he dies from cancer, this taking two years.  We feel the very closeness of the bond between the girl and her grandmother.  As is usual, the girl is perfectly adopted to her new country, speaking like a native while the older generations struggle.  Zhang provides us numerous brilliant telling small details showing how immigrants are treated.  The grandmother has a job in a factory on Long Island, making wontons for Chinese restaurants, she is paid by how many she completes.  She is able to make twice as many as average, begins to show other workers how to make more so the bosses say her work is defective and disallow half her completed wontons.  Welcome to America.  

This is a wonderful story.  There are two more stories linked on her webpage.  I will for sure read them soon and if the book blog Gods are willing I will read her full collection.

Jenny Zhang, 33, was born in Shanghai and raised in New York. She is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction. She has two published collections of poetry, Hags and Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, for which Zhang was compared to “a 21st-century Whitman, only female, Chinese, and profoundly scatological”. Sour Heart, a collection of short stories about New York’s Chinese American community largely told from the point of view of young girls, is the first book published by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s Lenny imprint at Random House in the US. - from The publisher.