In the South — 7/10
Among the stories in this collection, 华屋 Hua House, 维加斯的夜 Vegas Night, and 欢乐 Joy stood out to me. Of the three, 欢乐 Joy stayed with me the longest. It follows a middle-aged Asian man who, after the death of his mother, finds himself distracted while listening to music at a party. I found it difficult to read. It reminded me of my own mother. Our relationship is not the same as the one portrayed in the story, but still, something in their dynamic made me pause. I recognized a part of myself. A feeling of guilt, faint but persistent, stayed with me throughout the scene.
I wondered how the author manages to portray such intricate, often contradictory, inner lives without projecting herself into them. Or perhaps there is a degree of projection already present, only in ways I was not able to perceive.
What people commonly refer to as empathy, I think, can be understood on more than one level. One form begins with a simple question: what would I feel in this situation? It requires a kind and open disposition, a willingness to engage. The second form goes further. It asks: what would I feel if I were this person: born where they were born, raised in the time and place that shaped them? This kind of empathy builds on the first, but also requires close attention to detail, to the texture of someone’s background, to what has formed their habits of feeling and thought. Compared to the first, it is closer to compassion. For the person being understood, or represented, it may also feel gentler.
As I read this book, I felt that Zhang was attempting this second kind. Memory, observation, and interior monologue flow naturally into one another. To write like this requires not only sensitivity but control. As a reader, I often found myself in a mood of quiet sorrow. I do not think I would yet be able to render such emotional complexity with the same clarity or weight.
I rarely read literary fiction, and almost never books about Chinese immigrants. I came across this one while walking the Kumano Kodo with my friends. One of them lent it to me. I read it at night before sleeping, as a quiet kind of company. As the saying goes, there is something to learn from every companion on the road (三人行，必有我师焉。三人寄れば文殊の知恵。).
It is clear that the author hopes to represent different kinds of people within the Chinese and East Asian immigrant community. There seems to be a desire to find, or perhaps to shape, a shared sense of what it meant to be part of the first wave of Chinese immigrants. While reading, I rarely felt a sense of resonance. At times, I felt uneasy. I began to wonder why.
The first reason would be, I tend to think of myself as adaptive, open-minded, curious, and someone with a genuine passion of life. Some of the characters in this book seem to locate their sense of self-worth almost entirely in social standing and external validation too much. They appear lost and weary within a life that feels both dull and rigid, yet lack the initiative and agency to make any changes. I find such portrayals unsettling because they represent a way of being that stands in stark contrast to how I hope to live. This fear seems to trigger a defensive mechanism in me.
I share part of a background with many of the characters in the book. Like them, I spent part of my life in mainland China, and I know exactly how it feels like to be marked by certain labels and expectations simply because of the highly visible physiques. Being as someone always away from “root” (if there exists one), many of us have learned to seek belonging in the spaces between cultures, negotiating identity and self-understanding through that in-between. This is, after all, a book about immigrants, written by an immigrant. As someone who potentially belongs to this group, I naturally looked for traces of myself in these pages.
But I was disappointed to find none.
To give a simple example: Huiling Zhang may not have imagined that one of her readers could be a hopeless lesbian born in the twenty-first century (well, I know I’m not her target audience, this is a joke).
Many of the stories in Zhang’s collection draw on a familiar way of speaking about gender. The characters often refer to “men” and “women” as if these were settled categories, each with its own set of traits, desires, and emotional habits. These patterns of speech appear across different narratives and voices, and while they may belong to the characters, their recurrence gives the impression that this framework is largely taken for granted.
I found myself at a quiet distance from these expressions. The women in these stories speak confidently about what women ought to feel, think, or want; but their voices did not feel familiar to me. Their ways of thinking about relationships and emotional life followed a structure that I could not easily enter. I want to clarify that I do not feel myself apart from the category of woman. I identify with it very closely. That is why I felt unsettled: I was not reading from the outside, but from a place of belonging, and still could not find myself in what was being said. However, I know for sure, that there are many women just like me (I’m not talking about lesbians, I’m talking about ways of thinking, personalities, personal interests etc.) exists in real life. When fiction speaks in broad terms about gender, and when it does so without pause or hesitation, it risks overlooking these lives. It becomes easy to feel that there is only one kind of woman being imagined and attended, and the others have quietly disappeared from view.
I do not believe that all fiction must reflect every reader, and I am aware that author’s views, especially in fictional writings, can be quite different from their characters’ views. But I do believe there is value in leaving space for ambiguity, for variation, for the quiet knowledge that womanhood, like any human category, holds more than one shape. I am wary of language that draws too strong a link between gender and behavior, or between biology and personality.
I do not think that being a woman means feeling or wanting any one particular thing. My understanding of feminism is shaped by the idea that women share a social condition and context. I urge all the writers, especially when writing group portrait novel, do not easily essentialize people by default.
In the afterword, Zhang writes that life cannot be neatly divided into stages by age. She then reflects on women who have not married or had children, suggesting that such women remain in a kind of prolonged girlhood, unable to access other stages of emotional experience. Her tone is measured, not unkind. She does not say these women are incomplete, but she implies that their experience lacks a dimension. I found myself observing the distance between us, though. This was not a point of disagreement so much as a moment of a quiet contrast. I could picture friends of mine who would argue with her. One friend once had a similar exchange with his mother.
The moment made sense when I began to see Zhang not just as a writer, but as someone speaking from within a particular generational framework. Her narrative choices, her language, and her closing reflections all align once she is placed within the world of mainstream, first-generation immigrants who came to the United States in the 1970s and 80s. Her vision of migration is shaped by that moment, and her sense of womanhood emerges from the same place. This is not a flaw in the work, but a boundary that marks its context. It reminded me that even among first-generational immigrants, the way one sees the world is shaped not only by migration, but by age, upbringing, and texture of one’s early life.
As for myself, I hold no particular preference regarding marriage, children, or becoming a caregiver. I may marry. I may have children, with my partner (female partner, I’m certain for this one). I may not. These are not decisions I treat as fixed goals. They will depend on time, on chance. I already think of myself as a whole person, capable of a life that is meaningful and attentive. I hope to care for the people I love. I understand that a lifelong romantic partnership, if it happens at all, may be rare (and I will treasure it with all my best; but if not, it is fine).
Still, I was deeply moved by the sections of Zhang’s book that explored parenthood. I folded the corners of those pages, returned to them more often than to any other part of the book.
What does it feel like to become a parent? I am drawn to the question. My mother loves me deeply. When I once asked her why, she always said, “One day, if you become a mother, you will understand.” For a long time, because of my sexuality, I had never considered the possibility of having a child. But one morning last year, I decided to open that door. Because I wanted to understand my mother. I wanted to become the kind of person who could be strong for others, who will actively take the responsibilities and could protect and care others in a way that was steady and dependable, who could be trusted; like the many mothers I have met in my life. When Zhang writes from the perspective of parents, it immediately grabs my attention.
At the same time, I also believe that life can take many forms. Everyone is living their life for the first time. No one is more complete than another (No one can give a fixed definition to the completeness here anyways). To remain emotionally in a state of youth is not necessarily a flaw, and not becoming a mother does not mean one will never grow up.
As I wrote these reflections, I began to see the emotional shape of Zhang’s characters more clearly. They are complicated, contradictory, and at times morally compromised. They are weary, often resigned, sometimes quietly cruel. And yet, it is this complexity that gives the stories their emotional charge. The characters repelled me, but they also stirred something else – compassion, unease, and a kind of sorrow. Their pain lingers in the small moments, the silences, the things they cannot say aloud.
I found myself wondering whether Zhang, writing in Houston, felt a certain solitude. The kind of solitude that seeps into a narrative, unnoticed but always present. I find it difficult to imagine that someone who feels entirely at peace would continue, with such persistence, to write stories that return again and again to the same quiet bruises.
And then I realize that I carry privileges that many characters she wrote in the book could not have. I have spare time to read the books instead of laboring for the basic living needs, and this is such a luxury to so many people. I have access to a kind of education that allow me to build a mental or spiritual castle for myself, and I can afford to think about what a meaningful life might look like. That, too, shapes how I read. I tried to imagine what I might believe if I had lived the lives of her characters. The truth is I found that I could not say.
While reading certain chapters of the book, I kept thinking of a night in Geneva, drinking and talking with Lia. She was dressed in black, wearing a black mask and a cap. The logo on the cap was a hand giving the middle finger. She spoke about the men she had dated over decades in the United States. When she checked her phone, I happened to see her lock screen. It said “I love China.” At one point she asked me to talk about the men I had dated. I smiled and said, “Did’t have one.” She said, “Oh, don’t worry, you are still young.”
She belongs to the same generation of first-generation Chinese immigrants as Zhang Huiling.
That evening, the sky didn’t grow dark until ten. We sat under a tree. When we got up to leave, her cap was covered in bird droppings.
Neither of us knew when it had happened.
