New fiction review<\/p>\n

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Austin native Ada Zhang\u2019s debut book, The Sorrows of Others<\/em>, draws its illuminating and engrossing fiction from the real-life emotions, misunderstandings, and tensions that can be experienced within many Chinese American families and relationships. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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In this collection of ten short stories, young Chinese Americans keep doing what they can to try to find acceptance, happiness, friends, and success in the American world they have known their whole lives. Meanwhile, their parents, grandparents, or extended family members still remember China as the homeland they were forced to flee during Mao Zedong\u2019s destructive, deadly Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and the 1970s.  Chairman Mao attempted to change the trajectory of China\u2019s twentieth-century history by destroying the careers and lives of many cultured and wealthy citizens.  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The Sorrows of Others<\/em>, set in Texas, New York, Arizona, and China, moves fluidly through a range of seemingly commonplace, yet tense and revealing, events and issues. Some of these include coming of age, self-image, loneliness, love, marriage, divorce, death, disrupted friendships\u2014and who in the family did or did not take part in the Cultural Revolution. Many Chinese who emigrated to America during or soon after the end of Mao\u2019s turmoil still treasure some of the values and expectations that shaped their younger lives. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Older and younger family members may find themselves conflicted when a son or daughter wants to marry someone who doesn’t share the family’s traditional values.\u202fYet, these conflicts may not always revolve around major issues. As Ms. Zhang brings to light, young Chinese Americans’ views of their parents or grandparents can also be affected by a much simpler situation such as hearing their mother condemn the electric clothes dryer as a frivolous appliance, seeing her choose to hang wet laundry outside on a clothesline (or, when it rains, an inside railing), and knowing that when in their\u202ffriends\u2019 houses, most people just use their dryers. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Sometimes, in this book\u2019s world, visitors from China show up and reveal family secrets that parents or grandparents have tried to hide from their American-born offspring. In the story titled \u201cKnowing,\u201d a Chinese American fifth grader named Eileen is struggling to get into a Texas school district\u2019s advanced math program. Suddenly, she learns that her parents have arranged for her to have a math tutor. This, the author writes, is how Eileen recalls her reactions to the news: <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cWe were not connected by blood. He was my mother\u2019s best friend\u2019s father, and though I never readily recall this detail, his wife had just died, prompting him to leave China and move in with his daughter in America. I was told to call him Yeye. Grandfather.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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When Eileen wonders why she can\u2019t just call him \u201cSir\u201d or \u201cMister\u201d\u2014her real grandparents are dead, after all\u2014her mother insists on \u201cYeye.\u201d \u201cThat is the Chinese way,\u201d she declares. It later becomes clear that Eileen\u2019s mother, her mother\u2019s best friend, and Yeye were pushed to opposing sides during the Cultural Revolution, and one of them paid a very steep price for the others\u2019 accusations.  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Ada Zhang now lives in New York City, where she is an associate editor of adult and children\u2019s books. In The Sorrows of Others<\/em>, she builds each story carefully and quietly lets it rise to sudden moments of surprising power. She is indeed a writer to watch. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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