Jenny Zhang

At the beginning I think, I'm not sure I'll finish this. The writing is of course a bit sour; mean and explicit and unlikable, which makes reading difficult but is also so interesting in small bits. I really struggled with the first few even while I enjoyed them intellectually.
But actually, what a journey. By the end I think, this is actually beautifully honest and uncomfortable and, dare I say it, sweet. While the stories could mostly all be of one person, they are of one family in a show more fragmented and cohesive way. And the truth of all the anger and sadness and discomfort and searching make the moments of family and identity that much stronger. Of course, I also like sour fruit. show less

This is an immigrant story in ways whose detailed resonance on me is lost, but more important, I think, a story about how losing yourself in love for your family can be a last refuge against guilt and fear and how that can have some weird effects on the family in question, even if it helps keep your own personal self from disintegrating. It's funny and ambivalent and I liked it.

Sour Heart – a book that we all knew was going to be different and exciting, given the advance praise by Lena Dunham and Miranda July. I was itching to get my hands on it and pretty much started reading once I’d bought it. I don’t know what I was expecting in retrospect; perhaps to be blown away by each story? Well, I was but in ways that I wasn’t expecting. Sour Heart is compulsive, greedy reading that will shock and fascinate as you read about the children of Chinese immigrants show more living on the edge of the poverty line.

This is a short story collection, but the seven stories are interlinked. You will meet characters later on that were in the background of earlier stories and hear if they did manage to rise above poverty. You don’t even have to read them in order, but I think it helps. The stories become more graphic as you delve towards the middle with a sense of hope towards the end. One thing you will notice as you start to read is Zhang’s fondness for run on sentences. The opening sentence for ‘We Love You Crispina’ is a good sized paragraph with liberal use of commas. Normally, this would really annoy me as I tend to lose track of all the thoughts contained in the one sentence but Zhang makes it work. It helps that each section of the sentence sort-of links to the previous part and it sounds quite natural in the first person. I found it easy to look over this as I continued reading, but it might be worth checking out the first couple of pages to determine if the book is right for you.

Zhang really gets into the minds of her characters with the flow and conversational style of writing. Her characters certainly keep no secrets from the reader! Most of the narrators are fairly young children (about 10 or 11) and wow, they have the kind of sledging, insulting vocabulary that would put most adults to share! These kids are wild, swearing and sexually exploring where others are playing with Barbies and PlayStations. They are hardened to so much – sharing a room with the rest of their families or multiple families, seeing other kids steal and do drugs and yet they are still outsiders. Each child is hyperaware of their status – they don’t look the same and their parents aren’t the same as other American kids. They watch the American dream on TV but they are already cynical that it won’t be on offer for them. It’s sad, but the stories don’t get hung up on that. Each kid is a fighter, determined to stake out their mark in any dubious way they can. They can’t be sweet, sour is the only way to make it in this country. But they know that their parents love them and the family bond is strong, even when desperation and poverty force separation and cause arguments.

Each story in Sour Heart is super powerful, almost eye watering. Each story is packed to the brim with observations and emotions. It’s brutal in places (‘The Empty the Empty the Empty’) is jaw dropping in the portrayal of bullying a young girl and boy in the name of…sexual exploration? Weird childhood games? I can’t really describe the motivations of these kids, but it was shocking. Yet ‘The Evolution of My Brother’ is poignant and sweet in exploring the changing relationship between a brother and sister. If the intention is to provoke emotion, Sour Heart certainly does so. I liked Zhang’s style and her willingness to take on any subject. Sometimes I felt the exploits of these kids was too much and I just hope that it’s fiction! But I couldn’t stop reading and I would definitely check out what Zhang writes next.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com show less

Difficult. Fed my thinking about my own feelings of disconnectedness and fierce love. At times I was put off by how very raw the text could be; other times the rawness was endearing. Zhang assembles stories about loosely connected immigrant Chinese families to jarring effect. The narrative voices morph into each other, never becoming quite distinct; then again, the narrators' issues, though distinct, interweave to suggest something about the broader Chinese-American experience.

I might have show more preferred a more smoothed out text. On the other hand, we get a lot of that from writers trying to portray Asian-American families--a lot of polishing and smoothing out of complex, knotty truths--ugly truths, may of them. Whether you read her as on the sloppy side or purposely disinterested in orderliness, Zhang pulls no punches.

The defining excerpt comes at the end, describing the conundrum of the American child of a strong immigrant family: "How did we get so lucky? they'd say, clearing away the frantic voices of who I thought I was supposed to be, and though I knew it wouldn't last forever, I stayed between them until I remembered who I was again and no longer felt lonely." show less