It’s easy to see why Lena Dunham chose to publish Jenny Zhang’s compelling and wildly original debut book of loosely connected short stories at her new Lenny Books imprint at Random House. At first glance, Dunham and Zhang seem to be from different worlds, but there is much that binds them. Dunham grew up a rich kid, the daughter of artists, and attended private school in Manhattan. Zhang grew up the resilient daughter of impoverished and traumatized Chinese-American immigrants who came to America with high hopes that were quickly demolished. Yet the women seem similar in temperament: They are irreverent, defiant and drawn to the hipsters and outlaws who linger at the fringes of our society. Both seem comfortable walking a high wire and channel their creative passion into their writing, which often reveals uncomfortable truths.
Zhanghas spoken and written about the difficulties of her childhood. Zhang’s father left her and her mother in Shanghai when Zhang was only 3 to study linguistics at NYU. Her mother left a year later to join her father. She reunited with them both at 5; the scars from their separation still resonate. Her father dropped out of his Ph.D. program at NYU shortly before he was going to present his dissertation, and got a computer science degree from a local community college.
Zhang, while still a toddler, told her first stories into a cassette player. When she was older, she knew she wanted to become a writer. Her fiction often speaks to the sense of “otherness” she feels living in America. She explains that not a day goes by when someone does not make a denigrating gesture or comment about her ethnicity as she walks down the street. Zhang never had a mentor. If she could have had one, she says she would have liked it to have been bell hooks. She spent much of her young life trying to cope with the discomforting feeling of not belonging, being outside the mainstream culture.
The stories in Sour Heart are merciless in their depictions of childhood pain and loneliness. They chronicle the lives of Chinese-American immigrants who are living amid brutal poverty and frequent relocations in New York City during the 1990s. Her narrators are all unique, but in some ways they feel and sound the same. They are young girls or teenage daughters trying to make sense of perpetual chaos. The fathers in these stories are usually absent, lost to studying and delivering Chinese food all night for a pittance. They often cheat on their wives and emotionally abuse them. The mothers are broken women who often turn on their daughters, using them as receptacles for their angst. Little affection or tenderness is shown by anyone. The mothers are controlling, dismissive, demanding, combative or unreliable, and the daughters are left trying to decode the dysfunction that lies before them. Boundaries are often transgressed, resentments overflow and violence sometimes erupts. These are broken families who often turn on one another in despair.

The sTories are Merciless in Their depicTions of childhood pain and loneliness

In the opening story, We Love You Crispina, set in 1992, we learn about a 9-year-old girl’s life in Bushwick, Brooklyn, living in an apartment nestled between two crack houses. The family is forced to use the Amoco gas station’s bathroom across the street since their toilet never works. The neighbors, immigrants from Martinique and Trinidad, taunt the little girl when she walks home from school, shouting, “Yo, it’s the rape of Nanking! It’s really the rape of Nanking!”
In The Empty the Empty the Empty, another Chinese girl thinks obsessively about her mother’s resentment toward her. Her mother has time for friends and neighbors — everyone else but her. The mother continually chastises the little girl for being selfish and ungrateful. The child knows what her mother wants her to say and sometimes practices the speech in her own mind. But the little girl refuses to say these words aloud to her mother. Perhaps succumbing to her mother’s pressure would destroy what was left of her. Instead, she remains defiant and begins to think about other places where she could find people who really love her.
In The Evolution of My Brother, Zhang explores an intense relationship between an older sister and a younger brother. In one of the most magical stories, “Our Mothers Before Them,” the narrative bounces back and forth in time.
Zhang’s stories show us what happens when relationships between mothers and daughters die. We watch the daughters learn that their mothers are unavailable, not to be trusted, or worse. We watch them scramble for solace, sometimes to dangerous places. Zhang knows and has said that the most tragic thing about most of us is what people can’t see. Her characters are filled with battle scars whose origins remain invisible. No one wins in these stories, neither the mothers nor the daughters. Zhang refuses to look away and shows us how doors shut. How trust becomes eroded. How the ability to embrace one another again, at some point, is lost forever.