Review | Chinese-American author Jenny Zhang’s taboo-busting short stories mix sweet and rancid

Sour Heart
by Jenny Zhang
Lenny

Shanghai-born, New York-based writer and poet Jenny Zhang’s short-story collec­tion Sour Heart alternates between sweet and rancid, light and gritty, juvenile petulance and innocent grace – all within each story.

She also blurs the lines between fiction and autobiography: every story features a young girl who has moved from China (usually Shanghai) to New York with parents who struggle to make ends meet in Brooklyn’s cheapest neighbourhoods and struggle even more to give her the attention she craves in the rare moments they are together.

Zhang claims to have worked hard to ensure her stories are sufficiently fictionalised to not infringe on the lives of her family. Each is written in the first-person and they all have recurring narrative strategies, so plots and characters blend together – which is unfortunate, as Zhang has a bold voice.

She captures the cruelties, longings and absurdities of childhood and adolescence so well that readers may feel like they’re eavesdropping on the most intimate moments of the characters. Zhang repeatedly features juvenile sexuality and juvenile cruelty: of course, for children discovering sex and the power of sex in their immature way, the two are closely linked.

The second story, “The Empty the Empty the Empty”, graphically describes narrator Lucy and her friend, Francine, who are both in the fourth grade, touching and exploring each other’s genitals, making childish jokes as they do so, and saying how Francine “would suddenly put her fingers up to my nose […] ‘Smell it,’ she said, ‘smell it, smell it, smell it.’” Juvenile sexuality is generally taboo, but this kind of frankness is no bad thing, and we’ve surely had enough bildungsromans about the growth of male narrators’ desires and sexual competences.

Later, however, the story descends, or devolves, into the two girls and a friend probably sexually assaulting (the lines are blurred) Lucy’s boyfriend, Jason. (Lucy had chosen him because “he was the second shortest boy I knew”; his nickname is Shrimpson.) It’s dispiriting stuff. And yet the voice is always true, and we feel not so much outrage as sadness and disgust at their ignorance and abuse. Zhang packs a complex bucket of emotions into that story, and one can understand the revulsion some reviewers have felt, but it’s a brave attempt to bring a hidden dynamic to light.

Throughout Sour Heart, the characters are damaged and filled with febrile discontent.