SHORT AND SOUR
Sour Heart, writer and poet Jenny Zhang’s collection of short stories about growing up in a minority, is our Book of the Month
The first book picked up by Girls creators Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner for their publishing venture with Random House,
Sour Heart charts the growing pains of a group of adolescent Chinese girls in a New York migrant community. Through seven short stories, author Jenny Zhang (herself an Asian-american) brings to life brash and unforgettable characters whose naive exploration of family, identity and sexuality will feel painfully familiar, but is then intensified by their experiences of race, poverty and cultural oppression. Those familiar with Zhang’s poetry will find the same biting humour, shrewd wit and tender observation in her fiction debut – and if you’re not, expect to be struck by her singular talent, which Dunham says left her “stunned, moved and – quite frankly – a little jealous”.
HOW DID YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH LENA DUNHAM (ABOVE RIGHT) COME ABOUT?
Lena is like my fairy godmother. That’s not very feminist, but she’s popped up in my life when I’ve been down. She picked up my poetry book [Dear
Jenny, We Are All Find] and tweeted me one day to say she’d read it – we had a mutual admiration through the internet. When she emailed me to ask if I would open for her Not That Kind Of Girl tour, I had to ask my friend who had worked on Girls if it was Lena’s email address, to make sure I wasn’t getting catfished. I didn’t want to show up and some creepy guy is there with his pants off! After about four years when I had enough for a whole book, it made sense to work together because Lena had been such a great supporter of my work. I was writing something that didn’t quite fit anywhere, but Lena’s world and the platform she’s building felt like a safe space for strange people like me to hang out.
WHICH STORY IN THE BOOK MOST CLOSELY REFLECTS YOUR TEENAGE EXPERIENCE?
When I was a teenager, I had a very shut-in life because my parents had a fear that if I was allowed to socialise, I would destroy my life. So, much like in the story “The Evolution Of My Brother”, I concocted a scheme to get into a really good college program for high-schoolers because I knew they wouldn’t say “No”. I wrote a version of the story when I was 19, and when I went to edit it for the book, at 33, I felt disgusted at my teenage self. I realised this person feels so sorry for herself and her shut-in life, but she never considers what her parents are doing to allow her to even have a shut-in life – she gets to go to this program that costs $4,000, when they wouldn’t even dare to order a soda at dinner because they don’t want to spend the $1.25. It became about her realising there’s a price for moving up in socio-economic class, and her parents are the ones who paid for it.
DO YOU THINK YOUR STORY WOULD BE DIFFERENT IF YOU WROTE IT NOW?
I think so – it’s a different story at every age. I had to leave my teenage years and even my twenties [to] realise I’m not the protagonist in anybody’s story but my own. No matter how significant of a role I think I play in somebody’s life, they have their own story. In each of the stories in the book there’s a moment where it’s obvious these narrators are all focused on their own suffering. I’m still learning to be less interested in my own stories, and find the things that aren’t the most obviously interesting things about other people’s stories. I’m still learning to let go of my ego a bit.
ONE OF THE STORIES IS QUITE CONFRONTING, ABOUT A GROUP OF KIDS WHO VIOLATE A GIRL WHILE THEY’RE LEFT UNDER THE WATCH OF AN OLDER SIBLING. WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO REPRESENT IT THAT WAY?
When we had sex education in school, it turned out almost every girl in my class had been sexually assaulted. So many of them had no parents at home because they had to work until midnight every night, and it made me really sad to think of the horrible, painful irony of adults who work so hard so their children can have a good life but the trade-off is that they’re not home to guide their kids. But on a macro level, it’s a story that a lot of young people experience – being small and lost with no adult guidance or idea of what’s going on. It’s incredibly shameful and scary that when you’re a kid with no idea what you’re doing, something you do can violate and destroy someone in a way you later realise you can’t go back on. At the same time, we don’t know how to place blame because we’re talking about children, not adults. I wrote the story because it was something that was just inside me, but I still wonder if I did it justice and integrity and did it with an eye towards some sort of value. I hope so, but I can’t say. If it causes harm, I would have to accept that and take responsibility, but my intention was to expose and bring light to something that’s common and very, very difficult to talk about.
HOW DO YOU THINK YOUR CHARACTERS’ EXPERIENCES (IN THE ’90S) WOULD BE DIFFERENT IN 2017?
I think there’s a way in which these girls, who are outsiders and weirdos, might feel a little less persecuted and isolated, because it would be easier for them to connect with people like them online. The internet would politicise them and radicalise them. But on another level, they’d end up still feeling quite powerless because with the ability to talk about lives that are often ignored or marginalised, there’s a new kind of rage, of “What the hell? Why have girls of colour experienced such emotional and physical violence? Why are these communities in poverty not getting attention? Why aren’t things getting better?”