Jenny ZhangBesprekingen

At the beginning I think, I'm not sure I'll finish this. The writing is of course a bit sour; mean and explicit and unlikable, which makes reading difficult but is also so interesting in small bits. I really struggled with the first few even while I enjoyed them intellectually.
But actually, what a journey. By the end I think, this is actually beautifully honest and uncomfortable and, dare I say it, sweet. While the stories could mostly all be of one person, they are of one family in a fragmented and cohesive way. And the truth of all the anger and sadness and discomfort and searching make the moments of family and identity that much stronger. Of course, I also like sour fruit.

Sour Heart is a linked series of short stories by New York writer Jenny Zhang. Each story centres on a young Asian-American girl trying to come to terms with life as part of an immigrant family, and the burden of her parents' expectations. The parents and grandparents in these stories left China during the Cultural Revolution or around the time of the Tiananmen Square uprising, but their children have little understanding of China during that time.

The girls are mostly on the cusp of puberty and are coming to terms with their sexual awakening as well as their various family dramas. The living conditions that they undergo seem horrendous; a reminder that New York a few decades ago was an extremely unsalubrious place.

As a middle-aged white male, I'm obviously not the target demographic for this book, however I enjoyed all of these stories.

Incredible

I normally review things because I'm worried I won't remember them but I can't imagine forgetting a collection like this

All four essays were quite different, and quite good. Each brought quite a personal touch to the discussion of one of the March sisters, comparisons with the author's own lives from larger things like a whole upbringing, to smaller things like choosing a single dress to wear to an awkward social function.

Got some nice kicks of nostalgia just from remembering Little Women itself, and it was interesting to learn about Louisa May Alcott's life, which I didn't know much about before, besides the fact that she based the Marches heavily on her own family.

I don't think the essays were too short, exactly, but the book is a thin volume and it did speed by-- it makes me want essays on Marmee and Laurie and Aunt March too! The only one of the four authors I had read before was Carmen Maria Machado, but this makes me want to go out and pick up the other essayists' previous work.

This is an interesting examination of each of the March sisters. The chapters on Meg and Jo are interesting enough, but the chapters on Beth and Amy are innovative and provoking.

I loved these stories! The writer really captured the voices of angsty kids and pre-teens, and the private, dark worlds kids can have, along with the loneliness. I liked the subtle ways the stories connected, too. It felt organic since the characters were part of a similar community in New York. I also feel like the book captured family relationships in China in ways I hadn’t seen before but I felt more in this book than in other fiction about Asian Americans I’ve read.

Difficult. Fed my thinking about my own feelings of disconnectedness and fierce love. At times I was put off by how very raw the text could be; other times the rawness was endearing. Zhang assembles stories about loosely connected immigrant Chinese families to jarring effect. The narrative voices morph into each other, never becoming quite distinct; then again, the narrators' issues, though distinct, interweave to suggest something about the broader Chinese-American experience.

I might have preferred a more smoothed out text. On the other hand, we get a lot of that from writers trying to portray Asian-American families--a lot of polishing and smoothing out of complex, knotty truths--ugly truths, may of them. Whether you read her as on the sloppy side or purposely disinterested in orderliness, Zhang pulls no punches.

The defining excerpt comes at the end, describing the conundrum of the American child of a strong immigrant family: "How did we get so lucky? they'd say, clearing away the frantic voices of who I thought I was supposed to be, and though I knew it wouldn't last forever, I stayed between them until I remembered who I was again and no longer felt lonely."

This was a beautiful collection of barely-interconnected short stories. The first one hits you with a mix of sadness and joy when you see Christina and her parents struggle to make ends meet. The rest of the stories are people tangentially connected with their family, all similar in theme but striking in the differences of how each set of parents and children deal with both their old country and their new home. The end of the collection circles back to Christina, a welcome return. I feel like I could read a whole book about her.

Sour Heart – a book that we all knew was going to be different and exciting, given the advance praise by Lena Dunham and Miranda July. I was itching to get my hands on it and pretty much started reading once I’d bought it. I don’t know what I was expecting in retrospect; perhaps to be blown away by each story? Well, I was but in ways that I wasn’t expecting. Sour Heart is compulsive, greedy reading that will shock and fascinate as you read about the children of Chinese immigrants living on the edge of the poverty line.

This is a short story collection, but the seven stories are interlinked. You will meet characters later on that were in the background of earlier stories and hear if they did manage to rise above poverty. You don’t even have to read them in order, but I think it helps. The stories become more graphic as you delve towards the middle with a sense of hope towards the end. One thing you will notice as you start to read is Zhang’s fondness for run on sentences. The opening sentence for ‘We Love You Crispina’ is a good sized paragraph with liberal use of commas. Normally, this would really annoy me as I tend to lose track of all the thoughts contained in the one sentence but Zhang makes it work. It helps that each section of the sentence sort-of links to the previous part and it sounds quite natural in the first person. I found it easy to look over this as I continued reading, but it might be worth checking out the first couple of pages to determine if the book is right for you.

Zhang really gets into the minds of her characters with the flow and conversational style of writing. Her characters certainly keep no secrets from the reader! Most of the narrators are fairly young children (about 10 or 11) and wow, they have the kind of sledging, insulting vocabulary that would put most adults to share! These kids are wild, swearing and sexually exploring where others are playing with Barbies and PlayStations. They are hardened to so much – sharing a room with the rest of their families or multiple families, seeing other kids steal and do drugs and yet they are still outsiders. Each child is hyperaware of their status – they don’t look the same and their parents aren’t the same as other American kids. They watch the American dream on TV but they are already cynical that it won’t be on offer for them. It’s sad, but the stories don’t get hung up on that. Each kid is a fighter, determined to stake out their mark in any dubious way they can. They can’t be sweet, sour is the only way to make it in this country. But they know that their parents love them and the family bond is strong, even when desperation and poverty force separation and cause arguments.

Each story in Sour Heart is super powerful, almost eye watering. Each story is packed to the brim with observations and emotions. It’s brutal in places (‘The Empty the Empty the Empty’) is jaw dropping in the portrayal of bullying a young girl and boy in the name of…sexual exploration? Weird childhood games? I can’t really describe the motivations of these kids, but it was shocking. Yet ‘The Evolution of My Brother’ is poignant and sweet in exploring the changing relationship between a brother and sister. If the intention is to provoke emotion, Sour Heart certainly does so. I liked Zhang’s style and her willingness to take on any subject. Sometimes I felt the exploits of these kids was too much and I just hope that it’s fiction! But I couldn’t stop reading and I would definitely check out what Zhang writes next.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com

An intense collection of stories, each one told from the perspective of a young girl living in NYC in the 1990s with parents who had immigrated from Shanghai. The stories demonstrate the manifestations and aftermath of the trauma experienced by the parents in Mao era China and the varying coping mechanisms they utilize. Some parents drink excessively, others work such long hours such that they almost never see their children, while others cannot get enough of their children and are by their sides at all times. One father is physically abusive to his wife while another has an endless string of girlfriends. There is a grandmother who feels the only worthy thing in life is being a mother, so attempts to become the mother to her grandchildren, confabulating about the days when she breastfed them. She demands that they love her to an extreme. These are stories that show how the horrors of a generation (the Chinese in 1960’s China) affect future generations of children (American-Chinese growing up in NYC in the 1990s.)

It is about the children of immigrants in a country where English is not their primary language. It is about the interaction of these girls with both their families and the outside world. One girl is made to go back to ESL classes with each move and new school district, even though she has placed out them them repeatedly. There is an intensity to childhood friendships, a pushing and pulling, a competition that feels far more negative than positive. The stories delve into the girls’ exploration of their bodies and developing understanding of sex. It is often vulgar and disturbing. The emotional aspect of keeping up with peers about sex and foul language is a weight on some of these girls. The language the children use, both in conversation with each other and with their parents, is often angry and vulgar. There is desperation and depression felt through these characters. These girls are coming of age, learning about themselves and their bodies, learning about their place in the world. It is all at once confusing, disastrous and exciting for them.

In addition to portraying 1990’s NYC, the author offers glimpses of the year 1966 in China, when schools were out and children ran wild. The children were given the freedom and power to turn on any adult, accuse them of being counterrevolutionary, and proceed to torture and even kill them. One disturbing scene had a teacher tortured while tied to a tree by her students out of revenge for shaming one of the students in school. Anyone could be named counterrevolutionary. Particularly, anyone who wore their hair long and loose, anyone thought to be an intellectual, a member of the bourgeois class… or simply as a personal vendetta.

The writing is marvelous. Jenny Zhang is a masterful storyteller. However, the content is graphic. It is often horrifying, disturbing and seemingly distasteful. There is no sugar coating on these stories. These stories are full of grit, grime and dirt. There is anger, depression, sadness and sometimes joy. For me, Zhang was a unique original voice. I am glad I read these stories, but I caution others who might be sensitive to foul language or graphic subject matter. Sour Heart is the first book to be published with the LENNY imprint, a new imprint, in partnership with Random House, led by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner.

For discussion questions, please see: http://www.book-chatter.com/?p=1920.½

I appreciate Jenny Zhang, author of “Sour Heart” for her unique and unusual style of writing. “Sour Hearts is a novel with several short stories it.
The genres for this book are Literary Fiction with a touch of personal History that the author has based this on and used her Poetic License for. I do admire Jenny Zhang for “shooting from the hip”. The author holds nothing back.
For that reason I do want to issue a warning to people who might be sensitive to the use of bodily functions, and some scenes of violence, and some strong language, this might not be for you. For those readers that enjoy a different and unique experience, you probably might like this.
I find it very difficult to review a book with different short stories in it. First of all, I enjoyed some stories more than others. Then, it would take forever to review each story.
The stories take place in China, and the timeline goes back to “The Revolution” in China, where schools were closed and children would wildly roam the streets. The children could turn their parents in for any infraction. The stories are told as Chinese immigrants come to the United States and are faced with poverty and living in slum conditions. The stories are told of young Chinese women coming of age and the struggles they deal with. (emotional and sexual) Through the characters eyes, and their views of being discriminated, we see their discrimination to others Koreans and Black people. In one case, one young Chinese girl befriend a Black woman.
The characters are complex, and complicated, and many come from a dysfunctional setting. The author write about families, grandparents, mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, dysfunction, honor, love and struggle. This is a story of self-discovery and growth. I would recommend this story for those readers that like a unique and unusual approach. I received this book for my honest review.

This is an immigrant story in ways whose detailed resonance on me is lost, but more important, I think, a story about how losing yourself in love for your family can be a last refuge against guilt and fear and how that can have some weird effects on the family in question, even if it helps keep your own personal self from disintegrating. It's funny and ambivalent and I liked it.½

Sour Heart is a collection of seven short stories by Jenny Zhang. Zhang’s prose has a fresh informality that is exciting to read. Her stories are full of new imagery like her “oozy desire” to catch up to her parents in sacrifice to her anger when she feels like a balled up fist incapable of unclenching.

The first and last stories feature Cristina. Other stories are of the families that shared the same crowded living space with Cristina’s family or knew her family. One story goes back and forth from China to the US, and back and forth in time, recounting the cruel excesses of the Cultural Revolution when children turned on their parents. The stories are narrated by young girls, fourth-graders and high school students and often focus on the pressures parents place on their children through their own unending sacrifices, their multiple jobs and endless work to get ahead so their children can have a better life.

I think Zhang writes beautifully and admired her skill at crafting sentences and describing people and situations. She has an amazing ability to describe emotional turmoil and childhood angst. I would love to love this collection. But I can’t.

The narrators run together, how is Mandee different from Cristina? I would be hard-pressed to tell you. They all have parents who are hard working. They all have parents who place inappropriate burdens on them and use guilt to manipulate them. The parenting in these stories suck with mothers who may simply be mentally ill. There is precocious sexual exploration and damage. There’s this sameness that made the stories run together.

Then there is “The Empty the Empty the Empty” which made me physically ill. I put the book away and binge-watched TV because I could not stomach reading for several days. It’s a story of children sexually assaulting children in 4th grade. There is a lot of inappropriate and bizarre sexual exploration by the children in these stories and even with parents, one mother checking her daughter’s vagina to make sure she’s still a virgin. I don’t recall my friends and I checking each other’s genitals but it happens in several of the stories. I almost quit reading after “The Empty the Empty the Empty” and I might be a happier reader if I had. No story was as awful as that, but the dreadful sameness of the stories made me see them as possibly autobiographical, as though she has one story to tell over and over. I hope she continues to write, but I hope she leaves childhood behind.

Sour Heart will be released on August 1st. I received an e-galley from the publisher through NetGalley.

★★
https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/9780399589386/

This collection of stories focuses on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in both China and America. They are loosely connected; characters from one story will be mentioned in another. These people do not have the nice house of the family in ‘Fresh Off the Boat’; the family in the first story at one point are sharing one room with 10 people; the room is just mattresses on the floor. Not to mention the cockroaches…. Other stories have the children left alone to take care of themselves because bother parents are working; in one, sexual exploration turns into sexual violence. One man whose lives in poverty with his wife and child has an endless string of mistresses. A grandmother claims to have breastfed her grandchildren, she loved them so much. A mother demands to be loved more than her husband, putting her child in an intolerable bind.

These are really grim stories. I had trouble finishing the book. I don’t demand all happy endings and unicorns farting rainbows, but there were no bright spots in these stories. Still, there are moments of laughter. Zhang writes with black humor that doesn’t lighten the mood but does make it survivable. I think I’m not sophisticated enough for this book.

I was excited to pick up Jenny Zhang's short story collection, Sour Heart, after hearing so much hype both about this author and the first book out from Lena Dunham's new imprint. The stories primarily speak to the immigrant experience (China to US) and many of them specifically deal with the added points of view of lower class life and the experiences of children and young people. Reading the first story, I had to do a double take to see whether this was memoir or fiction, the writing is so personal and raw. In that sense, these stories had the feel at times of Bonnie Jo Campbell's Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. Sometimes difficult to read because they do feel so intimate, but so real and necessary, you can't stop reading.

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher via netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks!