Review: The Sorrows of Others by Ada Zhang

Reviewed by Colleen Mayo

A Public Space Books. 2023. 141 pages.

To a peruser of titles, The Sorrows of Others might suggest a type of cataloguing—story collection doubling as inventory of sadness. However, while Ada Zhang’s debut does ripple across registers of sorrow (isolation, grief, homesickness, severed friendships, disconnected marriages, loss of self and family and country), The Sorrows of Others strikes me less as a project of mourning and more as a testament to the transformative powers of narrative, to Zhang’s ability to shift sorrow into something more capable of change: life.

Throughout the ten-story collection, Zhang achieves this transformation with a skillful attention to character. Her opening story, “The Subject”, uses setting as a screw to bolt two unlikely characters together. A college-aged protagonist tells us she chose to sublet a room in Queens because of her interest in upholding a trendy image rather than out of economic necessity. “At parties that summer,” the protagonist recalls, “my living situation lent me an air of authenticity”. She continues:

I’d recently bleached my hair and dyed it blue to make up for the fact that I did not grow up in a progressive household. My parents are Chinese immigrants. We were middle class. Their politics were what you might expect….

“I live in Flushing,” I would tell a room full of hipsters, most of them art students like me. They all stepped closer. “My roommate is this old Chinese lady.”

Granny Tan, the ‘old Chinese lady’ roommate, becomes central to the protagonist’s thesis project, which is a series of portraits in homage to world-famous art from history. The summer passes as the protagonist paints and interviews Granny Tan, recording their conversations. These recordings appear in the form of transcripts spliced across the story, interrupting the protagonist’s narration with scripts between her and Granny Tan:

Do you miss it?

Miss what?

Being a midwife. Delivering children.

You seem to associate things a lot with emotions. Talking about liking this and missing that. It’s just work. I do what I have to do to the best of my ability. It doesn’t bring me great anguish, nor great joy. It’s a livelihood. It’s not love. Then when it’s time to move on, I move on.

We marvel at Zhang’s mesmerizing portraiture as a writer, which lets us delight in Granny Tan (Zhang’s attention to gesture and dialogue is so rich), and, more complexly, reveals to the reader more about the protagonist than what she can say for herself. In this way, the subject reverses itself. The protagonist makes a study of Granny Tan; Zhang makes a study of the protagonist. There’s a candor to the retrospection that allows for this—“I would like to tell myself now that I was interested in Granny Tan for who she was,” the protagonist reflects, “but what ended up happening tells a different story”—but the deeper investigation of character occurs in the unspoken. Granny Tan, who bluntly answers every question about her life during China’s Cultural Revolution, begins to turn questions back on the protagonist, who evades or shuts down the conversation. The protagonist eventually moves out, but not before learning she’s been massively overpaying in rent. This exploitation reconfigures the power dynamics yet again. “I’ve never lied to you”, Granny Tan casually dismisses the narrator’s anger at the end of the story, “I’ve always answered all your questions.” It’s a deeply satisfying final line, swerving the story’s gaze away from both Granny Tan and the protagonist and into itself, the very trappings of narrative.

The Sorrow of Others is Zhang’s, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, first book. It’s been given “5 under 35” recognition by the National Book Foundation. This is a well-deserved accolade, but it would be a mistake to assume Zhang’s status as a “5 under 35” honoree means her writing—either in style or subject-matter—is fixated on concerns and experiences limited to a young person. Zhang’s sentences are gems, both enchanting and clear, moving between scene and interiority with a striking insight. She allows us to externally observe a character one moment, then whisks us into their thoughts in the next, pressing our noses against a character’s brain folds. Operating on a more tectonic level across the collection is the legacy of China’s Cultural Revolution, a decade-long sociopolitical project launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 that vaulted China into violence and chaos. This event, during which millions of people died, haunts many of Zhang’s stories. In manners both intimate and grand, her collection feels committed to exploring how Chinese and Chinese-American people navigate the clefts between generation, geography, and cultural identity.

Silence, then becomes a motif through which Zhang explores her characters’ lives. Or perhaps something more complicated than silence: an absence, the inability even to iterate one’s memories, feelings, and desires. Zhang’s characters point out this narrative paralysis in lines that connect individual stories to histories of struggle, oppression, and violence. In a story fittingly titled “Silence,” for example, a grandmother considers how a roadblock in sharing her life isn’t necessarily the content of her experience, but that “every story relied on one preceding it, which made a story told in isolation a lie and one told in its entirety basically impossible.” Or, in “Knowing,” a protagonist’s aunt-figure only talks about a terrible history from the family’s past when the protagonist pretends that she’s already been told the story. Zhang’s stories feel like backdoors into histories characters keep from themselves.

And there are moments when small frictions make hair-pricking tension out of otherwise tiny exchanges, such as in the collection’s title story, where a widower’s daughter has arranged for him to marry a middle-aged woman who is from the same town that he grew up in. It is a practical union, sexless yet functional, as many of the marriages across the collection are. The new couple, Songhao in his 60s and Yulan in her 40s, are getting to know one another. They bond about the neighborhood of their youth. “I remember you from when you were married,” Yulan says to her new husband. Songhao continues the conversation:

“It was a long time ago,” he said, “but now that we’re talking about it, I remember you too.”

It was a lie. He had no memory of her at all, had trouble even conceiving of her as a child, but the least he could do was try to match her sense of their familiarity. He kept on lying.

I find this flavor of dishonesty more thrilling than heartbreaking—thrilling because it elucidates the desires that we all carry within ourselves to affirm other people’s expectations of who we are. But keep it up too long and we slip into self-deception, as several of Zhang’s characters do. In “Julia”, a young woman fashions herself out of the image her best-friend gives her, only to lose friendship in the process. In “Any Good Wife”, a newlywed couple carries secrets with them from China to the US, where they pretend to love one another as a “show of kindness”, recasting dishonest feelings into sincerity. In the end, none of these stories weigh judgement or expectation on the characters. Rather, they ask of themselves what right any story has to claim honesty when, given the circumstances of most Zhang’s characters, honesty (and happiness, for that matter) may impede survival rather than foster it. 

Moving from Texas to New York City to various cities and villages across China, these stories offer complex interrogations of home, relationships, and the many selves we carry within us.

Colleen Mayo grew up in Austin, Texas. Her writing appears in The Sun Magazine, Ninth Letter, Witness, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She’s received special mention for the 2019 Pushcart Prize for Nonfiction, the Jerome Stern Series Spotlight Award for Nonfiction, and an AWP Intro Journals Award for Fiction. She served a Fulbright English Teaching Fellowship in South Korea. Colleen currently works as Fiction Editor for American Literary Review and is an Assistant Professor and Murphy Fellow in English at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.