By Katherine Jin
The stories in Ada Zhang’s The Sorrows of Others are like prisms. In her debut collection, Ada renders ten portraits of Chinese immigrants that resonate at multiple angles and on multiple emotional frequencies. The experiences her characters have been through, that they try to sequester in the past, include things as intense as political persecution or secret affairs, and as mundane as crumbling friendships and unrequited bids at connection. Readers are sure to see parts of themselves reflected in the characters of The Sorrows Of Others, especially vulnerable and fragile parts on which Ada soberly shines the spotlight.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Ada in Brooklyn earlier this year, back when going outside meant being dressed in thick winter coats. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
Katherine Jin: The stories in Ada Zhang’s The Sorrows of Others depict a wide range of human relationships and their complexities. Throughout the pages, there’s everything from betrayal, devotion, friendship and estrangement— all happening against the backdrop of destabilizing forces such as migration and political turmoil. Could you tell us what inspired this collection, and how it came together?
Ada Zhang: I started writing what would become this collection after college, in 2015. When I wrote the earliest story, “Propriety,” I had no idea I would be writing a collection. I didn’t know I was writing a collection until I had a draft of all the stories in 2020.
It’s clear that the stories share many emotional obsessions. I’ve always been amazed at how people continue living past the extraordinary things that happen to them, whether that’s extraordinary love, or extraordinary pain. Writing is the only way I’m able to get close to knowing how people continue not just to live, but to find joy and meaning in living. That’s actually, to me, what these stories are about. And in some way, it’s personal wisdom that I’m seeking through writing.
In most of the stories, the major events in people’s lives have already passed. I’m interested in the part of the story that returns to daily living.
KJ: One idea your collection explores is the distance that exists between two people, how that distance emerges, and the ways people attempt to reconcile that gap. “Julia” charts a friendship between two girls who are very close in college, but who drift apart and become antagonistic post-graduation. “Compromise” revolves around a woman whose husband leaves to live with his mistress, then returns while dying of cancer and seeking care. What excites you about excavating nuances of human relationships and bringing them to the forefront in your stories?
AZ: As a young person, I have no business writing about a man running off with his mistress and coming back later when he’s dying of cancer. Growing up, my family attended a church. My mom told me years ago that a man from that church, one of the fathers, left his wife and children to take up with someone else, and then years later returned after he was sick. And his wife, a woman I still remember, was the one taking care of him. I was shocked, and thought How? How can these two people be in a room together? It felt cosmically wrong to me that this should happen, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I have no idea what it was like for the couple in real life, but in writing “Compromise,” I was finding my way into my own understanding of how strange and unexpected life can be.
I think “Julia” comes at that same question of How? Often, girls have these incredibly intense friendships, and sometimes, those friendships don’t stand the test of time. In “Julia,” there are some moments of heated dialogue, but nothing really happens in the story besides life pulling the two friends apart. I’ve always been terrified of my friendships ending. Again, it feels cosmically wrong that a good friendship should end and for reasons as vague as growing up.
KJ: Let’s talk about lying, pretending, keeping secrets, withholding information, and strategically telling the truth. So many characters in The Sorrows of Others engage in these acts, and while they don’t share precisely the same motivations for doing so, they all feel the end justifies the means. Granny Tan fails to tell her subletter her vested interest in renting the room. Songhao in the title story marries a woman her daughter chooses, to accept her love. Jessie in “Sister Machinery” tells her sister she’s hungry so they can spend more time together in the kitchen one night. How did you decide which lies your characters would tell and whether those lies achieved what they desired?
AZ: Yes, my characters are huge liars, thank you for picking up on this. They lie a lot.
KJ: I mean they also tell the truth, but maybe at a delayed time or when they feel it’s truly necessary.
AZ: Or sometimes they stumble upon it accidentally. It hits them at the same time it hits the reader. I think the lying stems from my characters finding it difficult to be close to others. Personally, I tend to be private, and have grown more so as I’ve gotten older. I can spend days alone with my cat at home. But I also think there’s something so beautiful about being with people. So it’s been this thing I’ve always struggled with.
KJ: I see what you’re getting at. You want to be close to others, but the only way you can be close to others is by being vulnerable and exposing yourself, which maybe goes against your impulses.
AZ: Correct. And it’s a risk, you know. But I think ultimately it’s worthwhile.
Lies say a lot about people. What we choose to lie about can be incredibly telling. Getting your characters to lie or hide the truth is a sure way to get to know them.
KJ: Some of your stories are told by aged narrators recalling events of their youth. In “One Day,” there’s a small vignette where you show how the narrator’s father is weak and dying, while the rest of the story the narrator is remembering a moment in her past where her father was not weak but in fact a very strong and inspirational person. When crafting these stories, did you always know the life trajectory of your characters? Why was it important to showcase both past and present?
AZ: I think kind of what you’re asking about is time, and I do like to play with huge scales of time when I write. In short stories, time can be incredibly thrilling to work with and play with, because the form is small. But time is huge. I had one teacher, Jess Walter, who would say time is the great trick of fiction. Fiction can do time better than movies, better than TV shows, better than anything.
When you think about it, every story is about time and what it does to people. In the story “One Day,” the major event is quite small, and it’s in the narrator’s very distant past. But major events can be something like your father coming to eat with you in kindergarten [the plot of “One Day”]. That can really stay with you. What do you make of a memory and your feeling towards someone when they’re at their deathbed, what do you make of that memory after they’re gone?
The other story you mentioned was “Propriety.” With a retrospective narrator, you’re looking through the tunnel of memory, which has so many filters on it at all times. In “Propriety”, adult Jiajia is the narrator telling the story, making sense of what happened, and adolescent Jiajia is a character in the story. So she’s both, and the challenge of a retrospective narrator is balancing the action of the story with the telling of the story. The former has something to do with plot, the latter with point of view.
KJ: One story that deeply resonated with me was “Knowing,” because the narrator’s uncovering of her mother’s turbulent past mirrors my experience piecing together my own parents’ past. The story touches on the nearly universal experience of discovering your parents are humans who make mistakes. What did you find particularly intriguing about telling this story from the child’s perspective?
AZ: Children are perfectly perceiving human beings, even if they don’t have language. That’s what makes being a child so confusing, I think. At least I felt that way as a kid. There were things I could perceive but couldn’t name. I think Eileen in “Knowing” feels that way toward her mother. She senses a depth to this person, the shadow of a past, and wants to know more, but her mother is not forthcoming.
That’s what’s painful about connection too. You may want to connect, but the other person is allowed to withhold. No one is obligated to share information about their life with you, even if that person is your spouse or parent or child.
KJ: There are two quotes I highlighted from your collection that are perhaps at odds with one another: “Every story relied on one preceding it, which made a story told in isolation a lie and one told in its entirety basically impossible.” And: “The challenge and beauty of math is in finding the smallest numbers to convey value. The fewest words to convey meaning.” The first quote favors context, while the latter tries to do away with it. When it comes to your storytelling, which impulse do you follow?
AZ: In a way, all the stories in the collection are about storytelling. How do we remember, how do we pass down information?
But when it comes to my impulse…when I start, I’m thinking about place a lot. That offers a context, a framework and an atmosphere, so I often start with a setting. I have to be interested in where the story takes place. There’s a reason why my stories are mostly set in Texas, New York, and Xi’an. Those are the places in my life that I’ve been able to observe closely. I feel inspired by them, and they provide rich worlds for my characters.
If the setting isn’t clear to me from the beginning, then it usually comes to me pretty quickly, and is a sign that I can take the story all the way. Sometimes I have a character, and I’m so interested in them, but they exist in a vacuum. Where are they? I don’t know where they live or what they do for a living, I’m just interested in a question that they have. And then I need to find the context in which that question will be tested.
The Sorrow of Others is available from Alexander Book Company, Belmont Books, Bookshop, Loyalty Bookstore, Massy Books, and Old Town Books.
Katherine Jin is a short fiction writer currently based in New York. She was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story prize, and has work forthcoming in The Margins by the Asian American Writer’s Workshop.