And that was something that only grew as time continued on, and the arms of modernity stretched their reach wider into the village. I grew up hearing a lot of stories of my dad’s upbringing in the village, but every time I went back, the reality of the place denied me the fantasy of the past. One of the opening scenes of my book takes place when the protagonist, Tang Yitian, returns to his village after fifteen years away and finds it utterly changed. To answer your question, I didn’t feel pressure per se in writing that disorientation-or at least I felt less pressure around it than writing other parts of the book-because it’s something that I’ve experienced to a degree myself. And thus, through their eyes, the world is remade, feeling both strange-we marvel at how such depths can exist in the ordinariness around us-and more luminous, the human spirit acting as the raw material for revelation.īHT: Your answer reminds me of a quote from The Song of Everlasting Sorrow that I love: “They don’t want to create a place for themselves in history, they want to create themselves.” (Actually, I loved this so much that I used it as an epigraph in my book). These characters make unexpected decisions and surprise us on the page. The artist isn’t the only one using another for their own gain, and we wonder to what extent we all exist as subjects in others’ lives.
When the old widower accepts his daughter’s matchmaking, we question what companionship is. Readers-especially fellow Asian Americans-will surely feel the chord of recognition in reading these rich stories.īut like the most gifted short story writers, Zhang takes the material of the familiar and hands it to us anew. An unsure teenager entering her first love affair. A lonely Chinese widower and his distant city-dwelling daughter. Encountering the characters in The Sorrows of Others, Ada Zhang’s debut short story collection, was like running into a cast of the kinds of people who have populated my upbringing and adult life: a young Chinese American artist searching the stories of her elders for inspiration.
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