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• Sour Heart ( short stories) Lenny (New York, NY), 2017

1. Sour heart : stories LCCN 2016058411 Type of material Book Personal name Zhang, Jenny, author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title Sour heart : stories / Jenny Zhang. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Lenny, [2017] Description 301 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780399589386 (hardback : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER PS3626.H36 A6 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Collections
  The Selected Jenny Zhang (2016)
  Sour Heart (2017)

  Novellas
  Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (2012)

• Wikipedia -

  Jenny Zhang (writer)
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  Jenny Zhang

  Born
  1983 (age 33–34)
  Shanghai, China
  Nationality
  Chinese American
  Other names
  Jenny Bagel
  Alma mater
  Stanford University
  Iowa Writers' Workshop
  Occupation
  Writer
  Poet
  Essayist
  Years active
  2010-present
  Jenny Zhang (born 1983) is an American writer, poet, and prolific essayist based in Brooklyn, New York.[1][2] One focus of her work is on the Chinese American immigrant identity and experience in the United States.[3][4] She has published a collection of poetry called Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and a non-fiction chapbook called Hags.[5] From 2011 to 2014, Zhang wrote extensively for Rookie. Additionally, Zhang has worked as a freelance essayist for other publications. In August 2017, Zhang's short story collection, Sour Heart, was the first acquisition by Lena Dunham's Lenny imprint, Lenny Books, via Random House.[3][6][7][8]

  Contents [hide]
  1
  Early life
  2
  Career
  3
  Works and publications
  3.1
  Poetry
  3.2
  Non-fiction
  3.3
  Fiction, poetry, and essay collections
  3.4
  Other works
  4
  Honors
  5
  References
  6
  External links

  Early life[edit]
  Zhang was born in Shanghai, China. When she was five years old, Zhang immigrated to New York City to join her father, who was studying linguistics at New York University, and mother, who had come to the United States after the Chinese Cultural Revolution.[9][10][11] Her father withdrew from the PhD program he was enrolled in, began to work as a teacher, and re-enrolled in school for computer programming, with the family eventually moving to Long Island where her father ran a computer repair business.[4][12][13] She has a younger brother.[3][14]
  In 2005, Zhang graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity. In 2009, Zhang received a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.[15][16]
  Career[edit]
  After college, Zhang moved to San Francisco where she worked as a union organizer for Chinese home healthcare workers and as an organizer for the writing non-profit 826 Valencia which helps children and young adults learn how to write.[11][15] Zhang spent a summer in Hungary teaching English as a second language.[11][17]
  While in graduate school at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Zhang taught creative writing to undergraduates at University of Iowa.[18] Zhang then taught high school students in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. She has also taught at the New School For Social Research and at Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.[19]
  From 2011 to 2014, Zhang was a regular contributor to the online magazine for teen girls, Rookie, for which she has written both fiction and nonfiction since the magazine's inception.[20]
  Among the essays Zhang wrote for Rookie were a 2012 tribute to the rapper M.I.A.,[21] The Importance of Angsty Art, an essay on embracing “bad” writing,[22] Odd Girl In, an essay about the conflict between the impulse to rebel and the desire to join political movements, partly based on Zhang's experiences with organizing and activism in San Francisco,[23] Empathy Excess, an essay about emotional abuse and the limits of empathy,[24] and Far Away From Me, an essay about the search for decolonized love, a conflicted teenage love for Weezer, and a deconstruction and investigation into fetishization, objectification, and internalized racism.[25]
  In 2012, Zhang published a collection of poetry called Dear Jenny, We Are All Find.[19][26] Zhang had written some of the poems that made up the collection during her time at Iowa Writers' Workshop, which she did in secret as the poetry program was separate from her fiction program.[27] She wrote the rest of the poems while living in the south of France. The poems were submitted to a contest for a small press, Octopus Books.[28]
  In 2014, Lena Dunham asked her to join a promotional tour for her book, Not That Kind of Girl. This later led to Dunham publishing Zhang's 2017 book, Sour Heart.[29]
  2015's Hags is an essay Zhang wrote in one night after watching Senator Wendy Davis do a 13-hour filibuster of SB5, a Texas Senate bill that sought to limit access to abortion services. It was the published by Guillotine Books as a limited edition chapbook.[3][26]
  In July 2015, Zhang published an essay called How It Feels for an issue of Poetry magazine that was curated by Tavi Gevinson. The essay was a meditation on depression, suicide, excess, Tracey Emin, and poetry.[30] It was nominated for a National Magazine Award.[7][31]
  In August 2015, one of Zhang's stories was included in the first issue of Lena Dunham's Lenny newsletter.[32]
  In September 2015, Zhang wrote about issues of racism in the literary community for BuzzFeed.[9][15]
  In August 2017, Zhang's short story collection, Sour Heart, was published by Lena Dunham's Lenny Books imprint on Random House.[6][33] Many of the stories were written and evolved over a long period of time, with the oldest having initially been written when Zhang was 19 years old, the short story called "The Evolution of My Brother."[3] Zhang said that the title and theme of the book came from a wish "to convey the unreality of childhood, the sweetness and the sourness of being so small, so helpless, and so dependent on adults. We tend to render childhood as purely idyllic and innocent, or totally nightmarish and traumatic, but there’s a spectrum of nuance that lies between."[34] Sour Heart, a group of seven bildungsroman stories, received positive reviews.[35][36][37]
  Works and publications[edit]
  In chronological order by section
  Poetry[edit]
  Zhang, Jenny (Summer 2012). "Everyone's Girlfriend" (PDF). Clock. Florence, MA: O'clock Press (3): 10–11.
  Zhang, Jenny (December 2012). "Flush in the spirals of black holes". Coconut (15).
  Zhang, Jenny (16 December 2012). "The Last Five Centuries Were Uneventful". HTMLGIANT.
  Zhang, Jenny (January 2013). "seppuku". Sink Review (10).
  Zhang, Jenny (January 2013). "goo goo water". Sink Review (10).
  Zhang, Jenny (26 April 2013). "The Universal Energy Is About to Intervene in Your Life". Bomb.[38]
  Zhang, Jenny (26 April 2013). "MY BABY FIRST BIRTHDAY". Bomb.
  Zhang, Jenny (Spring 2013). "My baby first birthday". Pinwheel (2).
  Zhang, Jenny (Spring 2013). "You are the poorest person here". Pinwheel (2).
  Zhang, Jenny. "uncle boo." Adult
  Zhang, Jenny. "My baby first birthday." Adult
  Zhang, Jenny (Fall 2013). "I would have no pubes if I were truly in love" (PDF). Adult. Third Rail Quarterly (1): 9–10.[39]
  Zhang, Jenny (Fall 2013). "It was a period when cunt was in the air" (PDF). Adult. Third Rail Quarterly (1): 67.
  Zhang, Jenny (25 June 2014). Adult. Archived from the original on 30 June 2014.
  Zhang, Jenny (26 September 2014). I Would Have No Pubes If I Were Truly In Love. The Hairpin.
  Zhang, Jenny (7 November 2014). I’m a 30 year old White non racist male, with some of my closest friends being Black. The Hairpin.
  Zhang, Jenny (November 2014). Dumb Theory. Prelude.
  Zhang, Jenny (22 January 2015). It Is Finally Midsummer. The Hairpin.
  Zhang, Jenny (27 February 2015). Is There A Way To Drain A Lake You Are Afraid You Will One Day Drown In?. The Hairpin.
  Zhang, Jenny (27 March 2015). Anaphora. The Hairpin.
  Zhang, Jenny (2015). "Don't Fucking Text Your Friends When I'm Reading A Poem It Took Two Years to Write". In Lauer, Lynn; Melnick, Lynn. Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation. New York: Viking/Penguin. ISBN 978-1-101-61538-6. OCLC 905345570.
  Zhang, Jenny (4 August 2017). "Follow Him". BuzzFeed.
  Non-fiction[edit]
  Zhang, Jenny. "Untitled". Altered Scale.
  Zhang, Jenny. "The Empty The Empty The Empty". The Diagram (9.4). ISSN 1543-5784.
  Zhang, Jenny (July 2010). "The Truth". Glimmer Train Stories.
  Zhang, Jenny (13 January 2011). ""Tiger Mothers" Aren't The Whole Story". Jezebel.
  Zhang, Jenny (8 December 2011). "The Evolution of My Brother". Rookie (4).
  Zhang, Jenny (18 April 2012). "Outsider/Insider". Rookie (8).
  Zhang, Jenny (8 May 2012). "Parent Trap". Rookie (9).
  Zhang, Jenny (11 July 2012). "Sneaking Around". Rookie (11).
  Zhang, Jenny (26 July 2012). "Liberating Things". Rookie (11).
  Zhang, Jenny (19 September 2012). "Saving Yourself". Rookie (13).
  Zhang, Jenny (5 October 2012). "It Takes a Lot to Laugh". Rookie (14).
  Zhang, Jenny (10 October 2012). "Eat, Memory". Rookie (14).
  Zhang, Jenny (15 October 2012). "Literally the Best Thing Ever: M.I.A". Rookie (14).
  Zhang, Jenny (14 November 2012). "The Great Pretender". Rookie (15).
  Zhang, Jenny (23 November 2012). "Only in My Dreams". Rookie (15).
  Zhang, Jenny (31 December 2012). "Mad Love". Rookie (16).
  Zhang, Jenny (11 April 2013). "The Importance of Angsty Art". Rookie (20).
  Zhang, Jenny (28 February 2014). "Hold On, Sour Grape". Rookie (30).
  Zhang, Jenny (26 May 2014). "Odd Girl In". Rookie (21).
  Zhang, Jenny (15 July 2014). "Hello, Darkness". Rookie (23).
  Zhang, Jenny (25 July 2014). "Jenny Zhang's sisterhood is stranger than yours" (Excerpt from Hags). Dazed.
  Zhang, Jenny (16 February 2015). "February 14, 2015, Part III". Enormous Eye.
  Zhang, Jenny (28 April 2015). "Far Away From Me". Rookie (44).
  Zhang, Jenny (15 April 2015). "Empathy, In Excess". Rookie (44).
  Zhang, Jenny (July 2015). "How It Feels". Poetry. Poetry Foundation.
  Zhang, Jenny (11 September 2015). "They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don't Exist". BuzzFeed.
  Zhang, Jenny (17 March 2016). "On Blonde Girls in Cheongsams". Racked.
  Zhang, Jenny (8 April 2016). "The Summer I Learned I Wasn't the Exception". New York. Archived from the original on 11 April 2016.
  Zhang, Jenny (12 June 2016). "Mitski: Beauty, Love, and Rivers Cuomo - Mitski in conversation with Jenny Zhang". Yours Truly.
  Zhang, Jenny (1 September 2016). "At the Salton Sea". Harper's Magazine.
  Zhang, Jenny (15 November 2016). "Against Extinction". The New Inquiry.
  Zhang, Jenny (9 March 2017). "25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going: #24: Your Best American Girl by Mitski". The New York Times.
  Fiction, poetry, and essay collections[edit]
  Zhang, Jenny (Fall 2011). "We Love You Crispina". Glimmer Train Stories (80).
  Zhang, Jenny (Fall 2011). "You Fell Into the River and I Saved You!". The Iowa Review. 41 (2): 150–160. JSTOR 23208462.
  Zhang, Jenny (30 September 2011). "There Was No Creek and I'm Still Alive". Rookie (1).
  Zhang, Jenny (2012). Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. Portland, Oregon: Octopus Books. ISBN 978-0-985-11820-4. OCLC 779872842.[40][41]
  Zhang, Jenny (July 2014). Hags. Guillotine Series #7. Archived from the original on 1 July 2014.[42][43]
  Zhang, Jenny (24 August 2015). "Settling". Lenny Letter. – also known as Pity Our Errors, Pity Our Sins
  Zhang, Jenny (2015). The Selected Jenny Zhang (eBook). Emily Books.
  Zhang, Jenny (7 April 2017). "Why Were They Throwing Bricks?". n+1 (28).
  Zhang, Jenny (2017). Sour Heart: Stories. New York: Lenny. ISBN 978-0-399-58938-6. OCLC 962438345.
  Other works[edit]
  Video
  "The Last Five Centuries Were Uneventful"
  "Comefarts"
  Photography
  Zhang, Jenny (18 July 2014). "The Right to Idle: Photos of Jenny's free days in Lithuania". Rookie (35).
  Honors[edit]
  2009-2010: Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Provost Fellowship[44]
  2009-2010: Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Teaching-Writing Fellowship[44]
  2010: Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Contest, 2nd prize[11]
  2012-2013: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Workspace writer-in-residence[44]
  2016: National Magazine Awards, Essays and Criticism finalist for How It Feels[7][31]
  2016: APRIL Festival, Writer-in-Residence[5]

• Amazon -

  Jenny Zhang was born in Shanghai and raised in Queens. She is the author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, the non-fiction chapbook Hags, and the e-book The Selected Jenny Zhang. Her essay "How It Feels" was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2015. She holds degrees from Stanford University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

• Powells - http://www.powells.com/post/qa/powells-qa-jenny-zhang-author-of-sour-heart

  Powell's Q&A: Jenny Zhang, Author of 'Sour Heart'

  by Jenny Zhang, July 28, 2017 10:12 AM

  Describe your latest book.
  Sour Heart is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the 90s. It’s exceptionally hard to describe what I’ve written without sounding delusional or boring, so I’ll just say they are stories about growing up, and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.

  What was your favorite book as a child?
  The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, because the protagonist is described in the beginning as a “sour” and “disagreeable” girl; the Wayside School series by Louis Sachar, because they are so weird and experimental; and all the Sweet Valley and Baby-Sitters Club books because it was comforting to sink into those totally far-fetched tropes of girlhood…I loved it.

  When did you know you were a writer?
  When I was a kid, and would bombard my grandfather with made-up stories about sliding down the trunks of elephants at the zoo on the bike ride home from preschool. And then again when I immigrated to New York and my ESL teacher had us write a one-sentence story and I went on for two pages. Then there was a brief time in elementary school when I thought I wanted to be a fashion designer, and wrote a poem about it that won first place in the Career Day Poetry contest, and immediately decided I would be a poet instead. I suppose I was a hog for attention and validation from the beginning.

  What does your writing workspace look like?
  A sagging pink couch with lots and lots of papers flung everywhere and piles of books open to the wrong page.

  What do you care about more than most people around you?
  What comes out of my body; but actually, I think most people care about that just as much, but prefer not to talk about it so explicitly and regularly.

  Tell us something you're embarrassed to admit.
  I forget the meanings of words all the time and use them incorrectly. Like recently I said, “Thank you for vilifying me!” when I meant “vindicating." Whoops.

  Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
  People should read Janet Mock! Start with her memoir Redefining Realness, which is a beautiful, touching, funny memoir about growing up as a multiracial trans girl in Hawaii. Then read her new memoir about getting through her twenties, Surpassing Certainty. I’m on a memoir kick right now because I also tore through Roxane Gay’s Hunger and was utterly transformed by it (I know, it’s like join the club!). Myriam Gurba has a memoir coming out in November, Mean, from the great Emily Books imprint at Coffee House Press, and I loved it — the brazenness, the irreverence, the tenderness. It’s full of attitude, and takes childhood seriously instead of seedily idealizing it through some kind of corny nostalgia for the past.

  Besides your personal library, do you have any beloved collections?
  I’m tortured by all of my material belongings, with the exception of books I truly love.

  What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
  What if it’s too interesting to reveal?

  Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
  I really wanted to go to Scotland because of the novels of Alasdair Gray, my favorite Scottish writer and weirdo, but I only made it to Edinburgh and a true devotee would have gone to Glasgow.

  What scares you the most as a writer?
  Losing my brain.

  If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
  Title: She Didn’t Really Like You. Subtitle: And She Felt Really Bad About That.

  Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
  The first line of Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Ode to Joy” is perfect: “We shall have everything we want and there'll be no more dying."

  I also like very much when he writes in his manifesto, “Personism,” that this movement he founded “puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.” I make all my students read it and then look up what a “Lucky Pierre” is.

  What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
  My biggest grammatical pet peeve is when people grammar-police other people and use only the narrowest definition of “good grammar” to dismiss, wholesale, writing that has a few errors. Let it go! On the other hand, I really like my friend Tony Tulathimutte’s approach to grammar, because when I ask him to check my grammar, he will correct and explain the rule behind the correction, but never pedantically. And he’s not annoyingly rigid or purist about it. His book Private Citizens has impeccable grammar and is linguistically adventurous!

  Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
  I like watching raw vegan YouTube drama, especially the videos that are just 45-minute-long epic meltdowns. There was that raw vegan couple who advocated eating 60 bananas a day as long as you did it before 4 p.m., and later the whole thing blew apart and the dude turned out to be a steroid-abusing, sociopathic scumbag.

  Top Five Books that Take Childhood Seriously (in no particular order):
  When writing the stories in Sour Heart, I wanted to convey the unreality of childhood, the sweetness and the sourness of being so small, so helpless, and so dependent on adults. We tend to render childhood as purely idyllic and innocent, or totally nightmarish and traumatic, but there’s a spectrum of nuance that lies between. I remember reading Judy Blume books and books like To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, and feeling so stirred that someone my age was worthy of consideration, worthy of a writer’s imagination. As I got older, I found depictions of children in fiction less and less compelling. We fetishize a child’s capacity for fantasy, wonder, and purity, but we also scorn them, treat them as idiots, use them as mirrors for our own wounds and egos. Children are both overestimated and underestimated. With great deference to those writers who do it right and do it well, I present:

  The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
  Here They Come by Yannick Murphy
  Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
  Cruddy by Lynda Barry
  Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
  ÷ ÷ ÷
  Jenny Zhang is a poet and writer living in New York City. Sour Heart is her most recent book.

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/08/the-rumpus-interview-with-jenny-zhang/

  In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang
  By Emma Winsor Wood
  August 9th, 2017

  On the first page of the first story in poet Jenny Zhang’s debut story collection, Sour Heart, the nine-year-old narrator Christina writes about waking up to find roaches had crawled onto her body as she slept, in her family’s tiny and squalid Bushwick flat. “And there was no beauty in shaking them off,” Christina says, “though we strove for grace, swinging our arms in the air as if we were ballerinas.” This image immediately struck me as a perfect analogy for Zhang’s writing—an attempt at grace in even the grossest, most abject of scenarios. And Zhang’s stories, which move from extreme filth to extreme beauty in the span of a line—and there and back multiple times across a single page—are graceful in their leaps and pirouettes, their Kafka-esque cockroach ballet.
  This movement from high to low, between high literary and non-literary languages, matches the kind of code-switching Zhang’s pre-adolescent, one-point-five-generation, immigrant narrators perform every day, between English and Chinese—and not just between the two languages but between the two cultures, two identities. As she said during our conversation, her characters are “in between the in-between”—not quite Chinese, not quite American, not quite girls, definitely not yet women. Her linked stories grapple with intergenerational trauma, racial categories and the invisibility of the “Asian” immigrant, poverty, and the often stifling expectations of familial love.
  Zhang and I spoke on the phone, her in Brooklyn and me in California. She said she’d been taking the time before the book release to read a lot as writing seemed pretty much impossible right now. She spoke quickly and in the same kind of complicated, extended sentences that fill her fiction.
  ***
  The Rumpus: Many of these stories show first-generation immigrants living in cramped, shabby, filthy conditions, conditions that have all but stripped them of their dignity as they struggle to get by, to make it in America. How much did you draw on your own family history or childhood experiences to write these stories? If so, did you struggle, as the artist-characters in “Our Mothers Before Them” with the “petty feelings of [your] subjects”?
  Jenny Zhang: They do struggle a lot. I was really, really, really sheltered growing up in the sense that as much as my parents could they took the brunt of whatever suffering or struggle was going. It was the kind of thing where they would not really eat for a week but I would be feasting on roast pork or something. There’s a lot of that, and there’s a sentiment that runs through a lot of stories of, How can you ever repay your parents (or whoever took care of you when you were growing up)? And also, Should love even be repaid, and at what point is that sacrifice now a debt that is carried by the person who is sacrificed for? So, yes, I did draw from that feeling for most of these stories.
  A lot of writers are kind of mousy people who would gladly fade into the wallpaper, and I was sort of quiet and shy growing up. I was the kind of person that was just a fly in the room, and people like my parents would have these dinner parties and weekend get-togethers with friends who were also immigrants and booze would start flowing and people would start talking. I was just there and I listened a lot. I remember reading about Gabriel García Márquez talking about One Hundred Years of Solitude, and he said he just sat around the dinner table and listened to the women in his family talk a lot. And I did that, too—not in a systematic or sociological kind of way, but those stories were just swirling around in my head for a long time and so I think many of those details came from that swirl of memories.
  Rumpus: Language is central to this collection—the narrators of these stories are caught between two cultures, two identities, and thus two languages, English and Chinese. However, the amount of actual Chinese—transliterated or otherwise—that you include in the text is minimal. Over time, I began to assume the parents were speaking to Chinese even when the dialogue was in English. How did you decide when to include the Chinese and went to “translate” into English? What was like to write across this cultural and linguistic divide?
  Zhang: I love that it started to feel for you like they were speaking in Chinese. I think I just wanted to write from deeply inside the first-person narrator, the interior space of these narrators. It’s really hard to convey being bilingual or one-point-five-lingual on the page because the code switching happens so quickly. When I speak to my mom in English, even if I’m saying the whole sentence in English, I have a Chinese accent. It’s not to mock—that’s just how we sound. That’s what I’m used to. I pronounce words differently in the presence of Chinese people than in the presence of people who speak only English. I have a different mind in Chinese. I had a whole set of experiences in Chinese I never had in English. I have a different sense of humor, different traumas, different joys, different interests. And I wanted to convey that.
  On the other hand, there’s a lot of understanding about how it’s hard to transition between one language and one culture to another, but I also wanted to show how seamless it can be. These families are all very tight units—almost like a gang or a club—and in this club they have their own language, and it’s one that would be very hard for an outsider to penetrate. I wanted to convey this language that’s so deeply coded to outsiders—readers.
  I also wanted to show that in their memories, the narrators don’t see their parents as broken or having trouble speaking. In their memories of their parents, their parents are absolutely fluent even if in actual fact their parents did not speak English well or at all.
  And I wanted readers, like you, to arrive at their own understanding of what these characters might have actually sounded like. Some readers might think they’re speaking in a mixture of Chinese and English; others might take the dialogue at face value. I wanted the reader to have some agency to interpret it.
  Rumpus: I’m also interested in the fact that these stories are written exclusively from the perspective of girls who are not just young but unusually small and very cute. “I was too small to be useful,” Annie says in “Our Mothers Before Them” and then there’s the moment in the final story (“You Fell Into the River and I Saved You!”) when Christina recalls how Darling “pretended she couldn’t see [her] because [she] was so small.” The narrator seems to be stuck in a kind of perpetual girlhood, a feeling that’s compounded by the fact that all the narrators are young girls. Why write from this position?
  Zhang: Some of it just was—that is, it was not necessarily a conscious decision. Some of it is probably that I’m just limited as a person, and I wrote from my own place of often feeling small as a child.
  I think also that we like to think of East Asian, straight, cis women as small, as dainty, as fragile. I think also in the world of these stories, the most jarring and traumatic things that will ever happen to these girls—or at least have happened to them thus far—happened when they were really small. A lot immigrated at five, six, seven, or were sent back to China when they were little kids. They go through these huge, momentously painful life changes when they’re small. And so they’re stuck feeling that way.
  A lot of them may be physically small and so very easy to dismiss and to be seen as nonthreatening but inside they’re really large, and some of them are also very threatening. Some of them are violent. Some are sadistic. It’s almost like the smallness of their size lets the largeness of their threat go unnoticed. I found that to be an interesting place to write from as a fiction writer—these characters who get to be stealthy undercover operators because they seem little and harmless, but, in fact, they’re kind of pulsing with feeling, with desire, with rage that’s betrayed by their small stature and frame.

  Rumpus: It seemed even like a metaphor for the invisibility of the Asian or Chinese American immigrant in US culture.
  On a related note: In “We Love You Crispina,” Christina’s dad says, “‘These people will never let go of the past, will they?’” And she thinks, “I didn’t know if he meant the white people in the movie or the black people but I knew we were not ‘them’ and to my parents that was a good thing, but I wasn’t so sure.” Can you talk more about this moment—about this realization? Why isn’t Christina sure this is a good thing?
  Zhang: I love that you mention that scene. I think they’re watching Gone with the Wind.
  Christina and her family are very poor for much of the first few years of their life in America, so that means they live in neighborhoods where they’re in close proximity to black and brown people—plus her father works at a failing public school. And, well, they’re not white, and they’re not black, and, in America, if you’re not either of those things, our cultural imagination doesn’t quite know what to do. America has a very hard time conceiving of anything other, much less talking with great nuance or understanding of anything other. And I have a hard time talking about it because I don’t even know how to.
  In these stories, the characters are constantly outside of everything: outside of the dominance of whiteness and outside of known marginalized groups. And they are mostly defining themselves by what they’re not. And so they know they’re not selfish like white people, and yet they also hold this deeply ingrained racism and anti-blackness. So they’re thinking: We’re not lazy like these people, we’re not violent like these people. But, of course, they share a lot of similarities with both the black and white people they encounter in their lives.
  In that story in particular, that family takes to this white American sense of adventure, but they’re punished for it because they aren’t protected by their whiteness. So when they adventure, they fail—they lose their housing, lose their stability. And they are similar to the black people they encounter in their lives because they too are marginalized, are seen as other, and they also share a lot of values when it comes to family, things like that. But they don’t want to see it that way.
  In that moment you mention in your question, I don’t think Christina is aware she’s Asian. I think she’s aware she’s Chinese, and she comes from this country she doesn’t really know or remember. It’s just starting to crystallize for her that she comes from this larger group and that her family is seen in a way they don’t see themselves—as Asian people. Then, also, her father whom she adores is starting to fall in her esteem. He turns away from his own failures to provide for his family or to succeed in the American dream by blaming or talking badly about other groups of people [like the black and brown students he teaches]. Christina’s starting to see also how Asian people are used in the awful triangulation—they’re foot soldiers for white supremacy, held up as model immigrants, and yet can’t really achieve the status of whiteness.
  Not that any of that is going through Christina’s brain at all, but she is suddenly realizing, if only vaguely, Oh this is how we’re positioned? but also Who are we in this country?
  Rumpus: The stories as a whole present a complex relationship with the past. Your narrators at once appear to be intensely nostalgic, fiercely attached to their parents, to both the freedoms and securities of childhood, and also resentful of how their parents and relatives “clung to their pasts and acted like bygone times were better than what was happening in the here and now.” So there’s an ambivalence to history, to what can’t be remembered, and yet obviously this history, both personal and otherwise, is central to each story. Can you speak to this tension? Are the narrators too young to realize the significance of history/the past, or is there some wisdom in their resistance to it?
  Zhang: It’s a uniquely second generation—or I guess these girls fit into that weird spot of one-point-five-generation immigrants; they came to the US when they were very young so a lot of them are in between the in-between space. But it’s a very one-point-five generation mentality because when you spend the first six years of your life in one country and then you move to another there are all these adults from the country you were born in who know you and remember being with you but you don’t remember them because you were a baby and it’s really weird to meet someone who’s like, I loved you for six years, and you’re like, Who are you? I’ve never thought of you. You’re no one to me. And these girls are constantly confronted with that.
  To me, it’s a feeling that come from one of those facets of girlhood a lot of people can relate to—like, Ugh, the wrong people like me and you’re like, I want this person to like me and instead this other person does. The girls just want to be interesting to boys, to the people they go to school with but instead they’re so interesting to relatives they don’t feel any connection with.
  Going back to your question, though: history hangs so heavily over these stories, and all of the adults in these stories carry with them the scars of history. They lived through over a decade of essentially a genocidal, tyrannical, authoritarian regime where they saw or did or knew of people who did unspeakable, unforgivable things. These parents carry that trauma, and no matter how much they try to keep it to themselves—or, in some cases, don’t try—it leaks onto the children, these people who they love and are around them.
  For these girls, the idea of China is just that, an idea, and they’re around their parents who’re talking about things that happened in a country they’ve never been to or don’t remember and so they feel a lot of resentment: I don’t want to know this. But at the same time, they have no history in the United States. No one before them had a life in America. They’re like, I can’t be connected to your past because I’m trying to making a life for myself in America—but it’s hard because they come from families that haven’t really dealt with their past. I mean, even now, the Communist Party of China has never really been like: HEY, so about what happened in 1955-1976… There’s not been a national reckoning. Some people go to their graves knowing they turned in family members who died or tortured someone to death. That’s the kind of nationwide level of trauma people of that generation carry. You can’t be free of the past if you don’t talk about it, and these families are constantly trying not to process the past and in trying not to they end up just vomiting it.
  Rumpus: In a way, their refusal to deal with the past mirrors the government’s refusal to do so.
  Zhang: That’s the problem—it’s not the individual’s responsibility to reckon with historic events that marred an entire country and people, but it’s the individual who carries these scars. Getting out of poverty is framed as an individual thing. Getting over assault or other trauma is framed as an individual thing. When actually, there’s a collective responsibility of institutions or the government that is never fulfilled and leaves these people who are wounded and maimed just wandering the earth. That’s another specter that looms over these stories. It’s just not possible for an individual to overcome an entire system or structure of things that cause pain.
  Rumpus: Is real love necessarily suffocating? [Read any story in the book, and you will understand why I asked this question!]
  Zhang: [Laughs] I don’t think it should be, but I do think that loving someone deeply is a kind of imprisonment for yourself and the person you love. When you love someone, you’re less free because now you don’t just have to make choices for yourself, but for another person. I think it’s very American—or I’m going to venture to say this, though I’m not sure if it’s too much of a generalization—but I think it’s very American to say, I want to be completely loved and to love and still be completely free. I don’t think that’s possible. I think it’s more of a Chinese and maybe East Asian mentality to see love as also about obligation and responsibility, about protecting someone and giving up a little bit of your freedom so that someone has the cocoon of love you want to give them. That loss of freedom isn’t seen as a bad thing. It’s just how it is. It’s just a given.
  The girls in these stories are caught between the two kinds of loving—part of them wants to know why their parents love can feel like they’re binding them or chaining them inside a room, and another part is comforted by that kind of love. Ultimately, that’s the kind of love they expect, so they have a hard time going out into the world in America and realizing that’s not the kind of love they’re going to find easily from someone other than their parents. They’re very ambivalent, and I’m also very ambivalent, about the shackles of love.
  Rumpus: You said in an interview with VICE that you’ve been working on this collection since you were a sophomore in college. Can you talk more about how the collection developed and came together over time?
  Zhang: I started just writing these stories, starting from “Evolution of my Brother,” (which I wrote when I was a sophomore in college—I believe in a class with my teacher Elizabeth Tallent, a really amazing writer herself), then I guess at some point I started meeting other writers. Just by chance, I met this group of writers I’m still friends with: Anna North, Tony Tulathimutte, Karan Mahajan, and Alice Sola Kim. We all just got hella nerdy about writing, and we would meet every single week and have writing group outside of the classes we were taking and I just started being like, Okay, I’m not crazy. There are people who want to be writers who aren’t weird creepy posers who write bad poetry but rigorous young people who want to write like me. From there, I just started writing a lot then these stories that I also continued to write when I went to Iowa for fiction, all from the perspective of nine-year-old girls. I became obsessed with writing from that perspective. As I kept writing, it became clear to me these girls all knew each other or all existed in the same fictional dimension.
  I finished the last story my last year at Iowa then I sat on them for a while. I didn’t have much luck with them. Though I kept trying to submit to agents or writing contests, I was “always a bridesmaid never a bride,”—oh, these are really great, but… I would just always kind of be the runner-up.
  I don’t know why but instead of writing a novel like you’re supposed to, I kept going back to these stories. I felt like for a lot of them, the skeleton of the story was there but I had to tear away that flesh and repopulate it… [Laughs] Not to be totally gross about it. While I knew there was a kernel of something I still wanted to work with, I had also grown as a person, and I was interested in other things. So I mostly rewrote all of these stories—some more than others. Most of them practically every other word was changed. For a couple of stories, I deleted twenty pages and added thirty—just rewrote them again and realized these families did all know each other. Unfortunately, it was still not a novel, but it was these linked stories.
  These stories have had several lives. This is their final life.
  Rumpus: Which story took the most out of you, was the hardest to write?
  Zhang: It’s so funny you asked, because if you asked my editor, Kaela Myers, she’d say every one. All my emails to her were like, I’m really sorry, I haven’t slept in ten days, this one is the hardest, I promise the others will be easier, and I’ll get this to you soon.
  But I do think the longest story “Our Mothers Before Them” was really hard, as was the last story in the book.
  “Mothers” was hard because that was the one that had the most actually set in China—and not 1990s China but 1960s China, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. That was really hard because I had to do a lot of research. I don’t read and write in Chinese. It’s always hard when you’re researching something that happened in a country not in the language of that country, and the cultural revolution is written very differently depending on whether the historian’s a conservative, leftist, or a modernist. There’s so much we don’t know about that time and can never know unless you’re someone who lived through it and then even if you lived through it your experience can be different from the other 1.4 billion people who also lived through it.
  My family members who did live through it mostly don’t want to talk about it and get very emotional when it’s brought up, so I made the decision not to ask them about it. It’s not worth it for someone to re-traumatize themselves so I can do research for my fiction. But, because of that decision, I really was like, Am I getting this right? Do I know what I’m talking about? Will someone read this and say it’s obvious this person has no idea what she’s talking about? I ultimately had to make peace with myself that I was writing about something that really happened under the auspices of fiction and that I did the best that I could with the material.
  The last story was really hard because it’s the last taste on the tongue before the dinner’s over. Originally when I wrote it, it ended on this pessimistic note—the message was basically that family was a trap. And that’s how I felt when I was twenty-four years old. But I’m thirty-three now, and that’s not true for me anymore, and didn’t think it was true for my characters either when they’re older. It was really, really hard because I had to go through that story and not just revise it but re-envision it.
  I don’t recommend not letting go of old drafts. I recommend writing new things. I think that’s easier. But I did it the unrecommended away.

• Jenny Zhang Website - https://jennybagel.com/

  No bio.

• London Observer - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/23/jenny-zhang-young-girl-reviled-and-fetishised-sour-heart

  The Observer
  Jenny Zhang: ‘The young girl has always been reviled and fetishised’
  The author, whose stories focus on young Chinese Americans and the immigrant experience, talks imagination, childhood and having Lena Dunham as fairy godmother

  ‘I’m both a pessimist and an idealist’: Jenny Zhang, photographed in Brooklyn for the Observer New Review. Photograph: Christopher Lane for the Observer

  Kathryn Bromwich

  @kathryn42
  Sunday 23 July 2017 08.00 BST
  Last modified on Saturday 2 December 2017 14.28 GMT

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  enny Zhang, 33, was born in Shanghai and raised in New York. She is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction. She has two published collections of poetry, Hags and Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, for which Zhang was compared to “a 21st-century Whitman, only female, Chinese, and profoundly scatological”. Sour Heart, a collection of short stories about New York’s Chinese American community largely told from the point of view of young girls, is the first book published by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s Lenny imprint at Random House in the US.
  What inspired you to write these stories?
  When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes I’d get comments like: “You should consider writing more universal stories.” But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl – just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women. So it was a little test to myself, wanting to show that every type of story is possible with these characters. The short story format made sense because I don’t feel like I have a life that is epic; I feel like I have a small life, but I also don’t feel minor or marginal. These stories are like overly plumped nuggets, neither a feast nor paltry.
  How did you become involved with Lena Dunham?
  Lena has been like my fairy godmother. One day out of the blue she just tweeted at me, several years ago, to say she had read my poetry collection and really loved it. I was afraid to respond, I was like: “You’re an actual important person in the world. I don’t want to sully your email inbox with my words.” But she would keep emailing me, being like: “Are you working on anything? Do you have an agent? Would you be interested in having an editor read your work?” And each time, I felt completely like: “Yes, yes, helplessly yes! I don’t know what I’m doing, but yes to anything that you’re offering because it all sounds good.” She asked if I wanted to send any of my stories to Andy Ward, an incredible editor at Random House who edited her book Not That Kind of Girl, and it just started from there.

  I have a different sense of humour in Chinese than I do in English. I’m shyer in one language than in another

  You also write for Rookie, Tavi Gevinson’s website aimed at teenage girls – do you think life is easier or harder for girls these days?
  The young girl has always been the most reviled and fetishised creature. We love her and hate her. The great thing now is it’s so much easier to access information; you aren’t reliant on the same five publications for info on how a period works. And with that comes less shame – I remember constantly feeling so much shame. But with access to these words comes access to images and narratives that are harmful. When I’ve scrolled through the fifth Instagram model on a beach in Capri, something curdles inside me and I start to think: “I need to get leg-lengthening surgery. I need to add five inches of bone to my body.” And I think that’s really difficult for young girls.

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  In your book, the characters strive to find beauty in messy or difficult situations, such as poverty, dysfunctional families, and the memory of violence in China’s Cultural Revolution. Is that something fiction can do with real life?
  Nobody wants to see themselves as someone to be pitied, yet there are entire communities that are victimised and mistreated. That’s an essential tension in these stories: from one perspective the characters lead pretty miserable lives, but at the same time there’s enjoyment and fun. I’m both a pessimist and an idealist – my ideals of what could be are so extravagant, but I’m also very aware of what’s possible, so I guess that’s a footprint I’ve left in these stories.
  How has your relationship to your heritage changed over the years?
  When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese. I grew up in a Chinese American enclave where the person who lived down the street had literally lived down the street from my mother in Shanghai. As I got older I realised that people saw me as other things – sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood I started to see myself as “other”, this amorphous category. I didn’t even know what “not other” was, but I knew I wasn’t it, I wasn’t what was normal. I’ve gone through a lot of phases – not thinking much of it, then starting to feel self-conscious, then feeling resentful or maybe even angry. And then I was grateful – it felt like an enormous gift that gave me powers of empathy, compassion and curiosity.
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  Has there been a shift in your lifetime in how immigrants are perceived in the US, especially since Trump was elected?
  It’s always been very polarised, but it does feel more polarised than ever – there are people who feel that the fact there are immigrants in the US has lessened drastically their quality of life. On the other hand, I do feel like understanding is proliferating about globalisation, and capitalism, and all the reasons why people migrate from their homes. And there are more and more narratives created by immigrants themselves – 20 years ago, the stories were purely of struggle, like: “Can you believe this is what these people have had to endure?” Now I’m seeing more representations of beauty, humour and joy in these stories, and that contributes to seeing immigrants as humans.
  What are your feelings about China when you go back?
  The first time I went back I was nine, then every four years or so. Recently I’ve been trying to go back every year, because it can be a horrifying countdown every time you see your family – how many more times do I get to know you before we don’t have any time left together? I can speak Chinese, but at the level of a third-grader. I have a different sense of humour in Chinese than I do in English. I’m shyer in one language than in another. I’m more romantic in one. So there’s a really strange feeling when I’m back there. It’s something I’m only just beginning to understand – who would I have been if I’d stayed in China?
  How is your life different from the life your parents led?
  It feels almost ultra-unreal. I remember being nine and realising my father was learning how to slaughter a cow at my age, that he’d learned English on his own because there was no school, and it was so hard to imagine in that moment I had come from them. I felt like I was of a different species. My parents always made it feel like my life was the only one they were interested in – they’ve lived their lives in a very sacrificing way, in service to my dreams. There’s a constant conflict of wanting to understand them, wanting to be understood, and realising some gaps can’t be bridged.
  Have any of your family members objected to the book because they felt exposed in some way?
  They haven’t. I took care to make sure – to the best I could without neutering the story – that nobody felt their privacy had been compromised. Just because I’ve chosen to make my concerns public doesn’t mean anyone I care about should be subjected to that. Even though really bad things happen to these characters, I wanted to get across that the question of who’s at fault is very hard to trace, and I hope that complicates the question of guilt and exposure. I also hope that, as a daughter, my parents know me enough to know what is my imagination and what is me saying something that I should really be saying in family therapy.
  Do you think there is a difference in how male and female authors’ work is treated, especially if there are autobiographical elements?
  I feel like I am revealing something about myself in these stories, but it’ll probably seem like I’m revealing something different than what I think I’m revealing. I think there’s an assumption that when women write, their imagination is not as robust and vast as men’s. But being a woman and a second-generation immigrant, I grew up reading and loving books written by people who had nothing like the life I knew – my imagination has been the opposite of limited.

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  Jenny Zhang on Karl Ove Knausgaard: ‘a quiet novel about domestic life... that’s why I devoured it’. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose for the Observer
  Knausgaard and Ferrante spring to mind as two recent examples that combine fiction and autobiography...
  I loved both of those. What I found most interesting about Knausgaard was how he feels so confident in being so boring. He would spend 50 pages on making pasta with tomato sauce – it’s so uninteresting, so banal, but somehow in the hands of a male writer it’s received as revolutionary, while in the hands of a female writer it would be seen as a quiet novel about domestic life. In fact, that is what he has written – and that’s why I devoured it. With Elena Ferrante it’s interesting there was such a thirst to verify she had indeed lived a life of poverty. I chose to focus on the fact she had written a great sweeping quartet of novels that spoke about the macro and micro of these Neapolitan women’s lives in a way I’d never seen before.
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  Your stories are mostly seen through the eyes of children and teenagers. What does that viewpoint bring?
  There’s this understanding that what happens to us in the first few years will shape who we are in the rest of our lives, and that always felt so unfair, because that’s when we have the least control and we’re completely dependent on grownups, who may or may not be fit to take care of us. I was also interested in writing about this really specific generation of immigrants: kids who come when they’re really young and so have a bifurcated childhood. You’re learning to speak, to articulate, and then suddenly you go to America and have to do it all over again.
  In a Buzzfeed article, you describe how white students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop felt your ethnicity gave you an unfair advantage. How did you respond?
  I’ve learned the art of the polite, tight-lipped smile. But I do it too, if I’m honest with myself – I’ll look at someone and think, “Oh, she only got that because she’s gorgeous and 21 years old.” When you feel you’re in a position of scarcity, it’s very easy to turn on each other rather than to indict the system or the hierarchy that creates such a thing. I understood why my peers would say that to me, but if I’m going to keep writing and have even a whisper of self-esteem, I had to shut those voices out.

  'Real Asian poets' fight back in Best American Poetry race row
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  When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
  When I first immigrated, I felt so stupid all the time. When someone was speaking to me and I couldn’t speak back, I felt they had the wrong impression of me: that I was dull, not intelligent. Writing became a safe haven for me, a place where I wasn’t accented, or my face didn’t determine how someone thought of me. In the first few years of school I was painfully shy, teachers would forget my name, and it was only after the first writing assignment they would remember me and write to my parents, “You have a really smart child.” And I liked that validation – who doesn’t want to be seen as they see themselves? I think that language was one of my earliest traumas, and it makes sense that it’s now the site of one of my greatest joys.
  What’s the most recent book you read that blew you away?
  I really loved The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector. It’s really slim – almost a long short story. It was incredible. It was like every word had somehow been defamiliarised, and I savoured every one.
  What’s next for you?
  I’m writing a novel. I think I’ve finally rid myself of my compulsion to write about children, so there are very few children in it. It’s all adults, which is great because there’s so many more things you can write about, like romantic relationships that last longer than a day.
  • Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

• W - https://www.wmagazine.com/story/jenny-zhang-sour-heart-lena-dunham-lenny

  a Chinese-American Voice We Haven't Heard Yet

  by Katherine Cusumano
  July 26, 2017 11:48 am
  Photo by Alex Hodor-Lee for W Magazine.

  When Jenny Zhang was 19 and a sophomore at Stanford, she wrote a short story called “The Evolution of My Brother.” It depicted the relationship between the narrator—a young woman named Jenny, the daughter of recent Chinese immigrants—and her younger brother over the course of her adolescence as she begins to distance herself, as all teens do, from her family. Several years later, Zhang exhumed the story at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she began to revise it.
  “A fellow student was like, ‘This is a really great story but it doesn’t seem like we ever find out what the brother’s personality is.’ And I was like, 'That’s so short-sighted, this story is literally perfect,'” Zhang, now 33, said with a laugh recently.
  Fourteen years after its first draft, “The Evolution of My Brother” appears at the center of Zhang’s much-anticipated debut fiction collection, Sour Heart, a series of seven stories largely composed during her time at Iowa that explore the narratives of the daughters of Chinese immigrants coming of age in New York circa the ’90s. Out this Tuesday, Sour Heart is also the first release by Lena Dunham’s Lenny imprint.
  In Sour Heart, it’s a given that the stories all play out within the same fictionalized universe. Christina, the protagonist of both the first story, “We Love You Crispina,” and the last, “You Fell Into the River and I Saved You!,” and the character for whom the collection is named (“sour girl,” “sours,” “tartberry,” and “sour honeybee” are all diminutives Christina’s mom uses to describe her), is the faded memory of a houseguest in “The Empty the Empty the Empty”; her family’s story is held up as a cautionary tale in “The Evolution of My Brother.”
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  “As you get older, you realize you’re only the protagonist in your own story, and a blip in someone else’s life,” Zhang said. “I don’t think I was, as a human, equipped to think like that when I was 19 because I was so concerned with myself and I thought so intensely about myself,” she added. “It was really relieving, because it made me think I had, hopefully, fingers crossed, progressed as a person.”

  Photo by Alex Hodor-Lee for W Magazine.
  The stories in Sour Heart have their roots in Zhang’s own biography—even if her characters are, she warned, "by no means representative of all Chinese immigrants who immigrated to the United States, or even New York in the ’90s.” Born in Shanghai in 1983, she moved to New York when she was about to start kindergarten. Her parents had already arrived three years prior; her dad was part of the first wave of students to come to the United States when China opened its borders in the ’70s, and her mom followed six months later. He planned to earn a doctorate in linguistics from New York University, but dropped out shortly before his dissertation defense; for a time, he taught as a substitute teacher, bringing home discarded books and newspapers.
  As a child, Zhang had “this desperate devotion to words,” as she described it, writing and telling stories despite the complications of an initial language barrier. “I loved to entertain,” she said.
  Fiction came first, but she soon found poetry; in addition to Sour Heart, Zhang has published a collection of poems, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, and the chapbook HAGS. She began writing essays and reportage when “adulthood started strangling me with its demands,” she said—she was among the first recruits to Rookie when Tavi Gevinson founded the site in 2011, and her 2015 essay for Poetry magazine, “How It Feels,” was nominated for a National Magazine Award the following year. The essay tackled her own depression in high school; the specificity and intense focus of her writing lends itself, too, to the stories in Sour Heart—to the the different forms of fear and violence within its pages; the joys and thrills and cruelties traded among young girls; the way emotions and memories are transmitted across generations; how language—and its deficits—structure experience.
  “I’m always interested in what is seen as obscene or profane or unfit,” she said. “The reader who likes my stories, I think they would see the violence on the surface, but I think they would also see a deeper violence—the one that’s not as showy or as immediately arresting, but kind of the more unsolvable violence that lurks underneath.”
  In addition to veering back towards poetry in the wake of Sour Heart, Zhang has also begun work on a novel, though she cautioned not to expect any teenage protagonists: “I don’t think I can ever write about young kids anymore,” she said. “I completely shot my wad there.”

Sour Heart

Annie Bostrom
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p24.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* Sour Heart.
By Jenny Zhang.
Aug. 2017.320p. Random/Lenny, $26 (9780399589386).

The narrators of Zhang's finely wrought debut collection are Chinese American girls and young women who pass through one another's classrooms, homes, and full-to-bursting apartments in New York City boroughs. Zhang, author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (2012), lets these daughters of scholars and artists, who in the 1990s take America up on its many slow-to-be-delivered promises, be gross and unkind, and swear exquisitely. They are deeply loved, and fear true terrors, like school bullies; their parents' high expectations for their futures; and the horrors, somewhat abstract to them, that their families have endured. Stacey, whose grandmother requires constant closeness during her visits to the U.S., realizes "I was old enough to understand how one of trauma's many possible effects was to make the traumatized person insufferable." Christina, who shares with her mother a love for only the sourest fruits, narrates the first story, in which she is on the cusp of being sent back to relatives in Shanghai so that her parents can get their life in better order, and the last, where she is older and maybe finally accepting the phantom-limb feeling that is the immigrant's inheritance. Zhang's insightful, combustible collection is in a class of its own.--Annie Bostrom
YA/M: Rookie contributor Zhang has a built-in teen audience for these stories about cursing, difficult, brilliant girls trying to figure out their families and their place in the world. AB.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "Sour Heart." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 24. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862708/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=487f7f2c. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862708

Sour Heart

264.25 (June 19, 2017): p86.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Sour Heart
Jenny Zhang. Lenny, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-0-399-58938-6
The first collection of short stories by poet and essayist Zhang (Dear Jenny, We Are All Find) highlights the intersections between several Chinese and Taiwanese immigrant families living in and around New York City, all of whom are trying to bridge the gap between the old world they've left behind--forever altered by the Cultural Revolution--and the new lives that they are now trying to build for themselves in the United States. The daughter of two struggling immigrants recounts the early days of her family's move from China to Brooklyn in "We Love You Crispina," meticulously detailing the many hardships involved in starting out with nothing in a foreign place. These mostly adolescent female narrators attempt to make sense of their histories as passed down through possibly unreliable stories told to them by their elders. Annie, the narrator of "Our Mothers Before Them," is regaled with tales about her parents' artistic prowess back in China before they were forced to flee the dangerous political climate and work for meager wages in a country in which they do not feel welcome. And in "Why Were They Throwing Bricks?" a young girl named Stacy is told violent and horrific stories by her visiting grandmother about a China that Stacy has no memory of ever having lived in. Conflicts often arise between what these immigrant parents want for their children--the kind of life that is no longer available to them where they came from--and what these young women, all of whom feel the powerful yet complicated pull of family, end up wanting for themselves. Taken as a whole, these linked stories illuminate the complexities and contradictions of first-generation life in America. Zhang has a gift for sharp, impactful endings, and a poet's ear for memorable detail. (Aug.)

Caption: Jenny Zhang's first story collection, Sour Heart, is rife with sharp endings and a memorable details (reviewed on this page).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sour Heart." Publishers Weekly, 19 June 2017, p. 86. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496643844/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=daabdb00. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A496643844

Sour Heart: Stories

Jenny Zhang
142.11 (June 15, 2017): p2a.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
A sly, intimate debut collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City. A stunning exploration of race, class, and identity.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
978-0-399-58938-6 | $26.00/$35.00C | 30,000 Lenny | HC | August
* 978-0-399-58939-3 | * AD: 978-1-5247-7656-5

SHORT STORIES / LITERARY FICTION
Social: @JennyBagel; JennyBagel.com RA: For fans of Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Junot Diaz, and Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist RI: Author lives in Brooklyn. NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Zhang, Jenny. "Sour Heart: Stories." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 2a. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668142/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2f7d88ad. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A495668142

Zhang, Jenny: SOUR HEART

(June 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Zhang, Jenny SOUR HEART Lenny (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 1 ISBN: 978-0-399-58938-6
A frank depiction of poverty and budding sexuality told through interconnected stories narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants.This first collection of short stories by Zhang, a poet (Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, 2012), focuses on immigration and the interiority of the teenage experience; she writes explicit scenes of sexual exploration and uncomfortable power plays among latchkey kids who are left at home unsupervised. In both "Our Mothers Before Them" and "The Empty the Empty the Empty," girls struggle with power over their own bodies and how they want to be touched. "The Evolution of My Brother" is narrated by a girl whose brother harms himself in an effort to test the limits of his body. Zhang focuses on the uncomfortable proximity of immigrants who live for years with little privacy. Through these young narrators' eyes, it appears that trauma "[makes] the traumatized person insufferable" to his or her own relatives. Zhang is most poignant when she allows herself to escape the confines of the teenage gaze, alluding to epiphanies that will come as these characters age and realize what they owe their parents. "It was only later, much, much, much later," one of the girls says, "that I understood and accepted that my parents paid for me to be free." Each story is narrated in the first person, so together they blur into a uniform mindset. Zhang's allusions to the complexity of the immigrant experience, the choicelessness of poverty, the diversity of marital relationships, and even the nightmarish fear of outsiders are limited by her consistent use of similar points of view. Graphic, uncomfortable situations sometimes substitute for complicated prose. Though bursting with possibility, these linked stories don't quite mature.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Zhang, Jenny: SOUR HEART." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329237/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9b081c09. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329237

'Sour Heart' Offers A Fierce, Fresh Take On The 'Hell' Of Coming To America

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR). All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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BYLINE: MAUREEN CORRIGAN
HOST: DAVE DAVIES
DAVE DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. There's a new publishing imprint in town. It's called Lenny, and it's a joint venture between Random House and Lena Dunham, the creator and star of "Girls," as well as the show's producer and writer Jenni Konner. The first book to be printed under the Lenny label is a collection of short stories called "Sour Heart," written by Jenny Zhang, a poet and writer who emigrated with her family from China to Flushing, Queens, when she was 5. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: The most famous line from "Girls," Lena Dunham's show that ran for six seasons, occurred in episode one of the first season. That's the moment when Dunham, in character as aspiring writer Hannah Horvath, makes this declaration to her parents.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "GIRLS")
LENA DUNHAM: (As Hannah Horvath) I think that I may be the voice of my generation or at least a voice of a generation.
CORRIGAN: That line has been deconstructed to death. Dunham haters ripped it for its narcissism. Dunham, herself, insists it was a throwaway meant to be just a joke. The one uncontested certainty about that line is that voice - raw, needy, original, feminist, loud, funny, bold and obscene - is what Dunham is all about as an artist.
Little wonder, then, that in launching a new publishing venture called Lenny books, Dunham says she wants to showcase young writers because of their voices, which brings us to Jenny Zhang and her debut short story collection, "Sour Heart," the first book to be published under the Lenny imprint. Zhang definitely has a voice, or as we used to say in Queens, which is the chief setting for the seven stories in this collection, she sure has a mouth on her.
Zhang's stories, like Dunham's, are mostly told through the perspective of girls, except the girls in these interconnected tales are the daughters of Chinese immigrants who've landed in the dumpy, outer-borough reaches of New York City in the 1990s. The parents - artists and professionals back in China - are hanging on by their fingernails in America, moving every few months with their kids from one illegally shared tenement apartment to another.
Some of this New York immigrant experience material is timeless. For instance, in the first story, called "We Love You Crispina," a girl reflects back on her family's struggle and says, everyone said it was normal to go through hell our first year in America, but no one prepped us for our second year. That's a line you could imagine emanating from the mouth of some cheeky kid in the Lower East Side circa 1909.
But most of Zhang's situations and language are far more violent and sexually explicit than the classic immigrant tale. These girls aren't sheltered. How could they be when they're sleeping on mattresses on a floor shared by their parents and three other families? They're tough and knowing, and they sound like it, although you can also hear vestiges of a childish vulnerability in their voices.
In one of the most moving and graphic stories here, called "The Empty The Empty The Empty," a 9-year-old girl named Lucy complains that her immigrant parents are always taking in strays. Zhang, by the way, tends to write in paragraph-long sentences, perhaps as a way of conveying the near-panicked intensity of her girls. So here's only a snippet of Lucy's extended monologue on those strays.
(Reading) We were running the world's first zero-dollar-a-night hotel and let all kinds of randos (ph) in. Sometimes it was a young family recently emigrated from a small village in Hunan who all smelled so bad, I had to stick cotton balls up my nostrils. Or else it was a young Taiwanese woman my mother met in the supermarket, who had all kinds of weird facial tics we weren't allowed to even react to because my mother said this woman had lived a traumatic life beyond anything you could ever imagine. And I said, well, I can imagine anything, so that doesn't count.
Despite her hard attitude, Lucy ends up being bullied by another girl into tying up and trying to have sex with her terrified fourth-grade boyfriend. It's a grotesque scene, but one in which Zhang deftly swirls in Lucy's resentment at her crowded, immigrant home life with her lost feeling of being all on her own to figure out how to be an American adolescent.
Most of Zhang's other stories in "Sour Heart" are also simultaneously tough to read and yet worth it. There's something very compelling about young girls in fiction and in life who speak up - and if their voices are rude, funny, even offensive sometimes, all the better. Given this fierce debut, I'll be giving the other voices Dunham finds a careful listen.
DAVIES: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Sour Heart" by Jenny Zhang.
On tomorrow's show, a remarkable story about the psychological cost of war. When Marine Sergeant Thomas Brennan was wounded in Afghanistan, veteran war photographer Finbarr O'Reilly was there to capture the images. Their joint memoir about Brennan's brain injury and the trauma they both experienced is called "Shooting Ghosts." I hope you can join us.
FRESH AIR'S executive producer is Danny Miller. Our engineer is Adam Stanishevsky (ph). Our associate producer for online media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross, I'm Dave Davies.
(SOUNDBITE OF MULATU ASTATKE'S "CHIFERRA")
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"'Sour Heart' Offers A Fierce, Fresh Take On The 'Hell' Of Coming To America." Fresh Air, 23 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A503681960/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=902e78b4. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A503681960

Bostrom, Annie. "Sour Heart." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 24. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862708/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=487f7f2c. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017. "Sour Heart." Publishers Weekly, 19 June 2017, p. 86. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A496643844/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=daabdb00. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017. Zhang, Jenny. "Sour Heart: Stories." Library Journal, 15 June 2017, p. 2a. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495668142/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2f7d88ad. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017. "Zhang, Jenny: SOUR HEART." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329237/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9b081c09. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017. "'Sour Heart' Offers A Fierce, Fresh Take On The 'Hell' Of Coming To America." Fresh Air, 23 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A503681960/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=902e78b4. Accessed 14 Dec. 2017.

• New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/jenny-zhangs-obscene-beautiful-moving-story-collection-sour-heart
  Word count: 1449

  Jenny Zhang’s Obscene, Beautiful, Moving Story Collection, “Sour Heart”

  By Jia TolentinoAugust 14, 2017

  Zhang’s new feminist bildungsroman depicts a collective coming of age.Photograph Courtesy Jenny Zhang

  Jenny Zhang’s astounding short-story collection, “Sour Heart,” combines ingenious and tightly controlled technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness that frequently moves, within single sentences, from overwhelming beauty to abject pain. Its first story, “We Love You Crispina,” opens by situating its narrator, Christina, in a building in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that’s tucked between drug houses. Christina and her parents wake up coated in roaches each morning; in shaking the bugs off their limbs, she says, they “strove for grace, swinging our arms in the air as if we were ballerinas.” The story’s second sentence sprawls over an entire page and details, in harrowing fashion, the scatological logistics involved if one of them has to use the toilet in the apartment rather than the safer option at the Amoco across the street. The sentence functions like a page-long overture for the whole collection, ranging from the comic (a family using “old toothbrushes and chopsticks to mash our king-sized shits into smaller pieces”) to the brutally intimate (“secretly I blamed myself for instigating all our downward spirals”), sketching the cyclical weaknesses of a family (Christina’s father, realizing she’d been waiting all month to ask for a single ice cream, buys her the ice cream and also a rhinestone anklet, which is why there’s never any money for a toilet plunger) as well as its extraordinary private strengths. It—the sentence—concludes with Christina observing that, in later apartments, “it still wasn’t simple either, but at least we could take shits at our own convenience, and that was nothing to forget about or diminish.”
  There are eight stories in “Sour Heart,” and the first and last are narrated by Christina. The other narrators resemble Christina in obvious ways: they are first-generation Chinese-American girls who live in the outer boroughs or on Long Island, typically with a single sibling (usually a brother) and parents who have outsized standing in their children’s hearts. But, mostly, the girls of Zhang’s collection, who narrate their stories in retrospect, are mutually exclusive versions of each other. The collection’s organizing theme is familial love that warps a person beyond all recognition: specifically, a type of immigrant devotion with a power that is both creative and entropic, and which affects its recipients in idiosyncratic ways. The parents in “Sour Heart” vary widely—they are seamstresses, bicycle delivery guys, bookkeepers, failed avant-garde filmmakers; they are alternately spontaneous, brittle, prudent, empty-headed, cruel, affectionate, needy. They are connected by a certain Washington Heights apartment, which recent immigrants use as temporary housing and which Zhang uses like a narrative polestar: the characters offhandedly reminisce about their nights in this cramped shithole, with a sad girl named Christina who wouldn’t stop scratching her legs. Their daughters carry very specific inheritances, which are complementary but not interchangeable. “Sour Heart” is a feminist bildungsroman—the narrators act upon their world just as much as the world acts upon them—and it depicts, from start to finish, a collective coming of age.
  Until now, Zhang has been better known for poetry and essays, but she has a background in fiction—it’s what she studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—and she has a knack for deploying and combining common literary devices for mischievous, unexpected ends. “Sour Heart” is frequently disgusting, but the obscenity often serves as misdirection. Love and poverty are distracted or doubled: one character eats a piece of spit-coated ham she finds in her brother’s mouth; when Christina is in a sickly phase and throws up her dinners, her father eats her vomit and gives her the food he had planned to eat himself. While reading a story called “The Empty the Empty the Empty,” I found myself unable to finish my own dinner. Lucy, the narrator, and her friend Francine have one of those early, escalating, codependent friendships: they spend all afternoon “digging around in each other’s vaginas, and when I least expected it, she would suddenly put her fingers up to my nose.” In the story’s final scene, Lucy and Francine tie Lucy’s cousin Frangie to the bed and order Lucy’s boyfriend, Jason, to have sex with her. They’re fourth graders—clueless, fumbling. Jason’s penis is “shiny and gross with [Francine’s] saliva but still tiny and soft.” But what really wrecked me in this hideous tableau were Lucy’s attempts at kindness. “Frangie,” she says, “I still want to be a jellyfish with you. . . . I saved an orange soda for you. I’ll get Eddie to put your name on it so that I don’t forget and drink it by accident.”
  Zhang uses the collection’s structure to check and subvert her characters’ narrative authority. Christina’s universe, a private kaleidoscope of sorrow and love, is dismissed in other stories as an object lesson in irresponsibility. Lucy imagines herself as a magnetic figure: “the lights in the gymnasium followed me everywhere I went, and surely I was the shining, burning asteroid-comet-sun-galaxy-universe-rings-of-Saturn-ninth-wonder-of-the-world-never-gonna-burn-out star of the dance.” In another story, a former classmate of Lucy’s remembers her briefly and witheringly, as a tiny girl who thought her size made her cute. As Christian Lorentzen noted at Vulture, child narrators rarely improve fiction; they’re often “too cute, too smart, cloying, fatally earnest, or too innocent to be interesting.” But Zhang’s child narrators serve as apt vessels for the writer-friendly psychological tics that plague most fictional characters, regardless of age. Protagonists in literature generally seem overloaded with feelings of possibility and futility; they have acute, superstitious senses of cause and effect. They arrive at epiphanies with a mechanical regularity: close to the end of a short story, there’s often a moment where details start crystallizing portentously, where time starts to expand into eternity. This can all feel practiced. But this is also how kids’ minds actually, privately work, a fact that Zhang makes canny use of. “Sour Heart” has a delightful air of artlessness, the result, surely, of careful and worked-over craft. (Zhang puts the epiphanic finale to particularly strange and beautiful use at the end of a story called “Why Were They Throwing Bricks?”)
  In interviews, Zhang has spoken about how certain immigrant experiences are central to her collection: the constrictive intimacy within families that can’t be understood by outsiders, and the way that bind is corroded, helpfully and terribly, by an upwardly mobile American life. Zhang told Electric Literature that when she was younger, she “wanted to be loved less by my family and loved more by others—friends, lovers, basically anyone who wasn’t related to me.” She added, “It’s very Western to idealize a kind of love that does not come with any expectations, that still permits both the giver and recipient to be completely free.” And yet this model of esteem, which does seem particularly American—ahistorical, individual—maps perfectly onto the multi-generational immigrant longing for a fresh start. The coming-of-age story in “Sour Heart” is a story of learning to reject, lovingly, the totalizing quality of your parents’ love. The right to be a little cruel is often what immigrants bequeath to their children.
  In a story called “The Evolution of My Brother,” the narrator asks her parents to send her across the country, to Stanford, for a three-week philosophy program. She doesn’t realize that she’s demanding half a year’s salary from two people whose first big plane trip was flying from Shanghai to America with hard-boiled eggs in their pockets. Later on, she regrets her foreordained selfishness. One day, she goes through the old family computer, and she finds her little brother’s stash of Microsoft Paint art work, which he had always tried to show off to her. She clicks on a file called “Power Rain Jurs” and crumbles into tears. “I felt self-conscious and stupid crying for myself—for my shame, for my regrets, for how quickly a childhood happens. I wish I had acted better. I wish I had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for ‘Power Rangers.’ I wish it wasn’t so natural for me to dwell on the past.” But to dwell on the past like this is a profound act of love, akin to sacrificing for the future; it means doing for your family what no one demanded of you but yourself.

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