AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, , within the first few paragraphs—sometimes the first few sentences—I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me. It’s tempting to chalk this up to shared cultural experience, to say that I saw myself in one story’s self-destructive Chinese American teenager on a hot May night in Texas, or my parents in another story’s newly immigrated couple grimly reinventing themselves over green bean casserole, or my grandparents in the shadows and silences created by the Cultural Revolution in these stories. But this would be facile and untrue. I felt this way because Zhang is a master ofevery gesture and perception colored by a lifetime of memory, the privacy and singularity of the mind, the irreducible multitudes contained within. This is a debut with the subtlety, confidence, and range of a seasoned writer. When these characters speak past each other, when they confound and misunderstand each other, when the story they tell isn’t the story that’s heard, when they look in the same direction and each see something completely different, I felt so acutely that impassable gulf between bodies, that unknowability, even as I marveled at literature’s capacity—and, more specifically, Zhang’s gift as a writer—to transcend it.
