***WARNING*** This is a reading journal rather than a review, so it will be riddled with unmarked spoilers. You have been warned. China Mountain -- Zhang:- So far, Zhang is nothing like I expected, neither the character nor the book. I expected a cyber-punky action thriller, and it may still become that, but this first chapter offers no signs that a change is going to come. At this point it is a study of two characters: Zhang and San-xiang; the former is our gay half-ABC (American Born Chinese) half-Spanish (from Spain) engineer; the latter is our unfortunately “ugly” political girl. It’s them, together, moving through New York in a Chinese dominated near (not so near?) future, thrust together by her Chinese parents and finding that they quite like each other despite his sexuality (which she never seems to peg) and her ugliness (which fascinates him). It’s moody, it’s atmospheric, and the milieu is entirely plausible. But the banality of the tale, so far, is quite a surprise. It is an average character study that could just as easily be told in your city, right now, today, and it would still be as likable and readable as this story is. If there is going to be something more like actiony Sci-Fi I can’t imagine how it would come about. But then, I don’t think I want it to. I am liking this book for its banality. Why not set a story like this in the future? Works for me.Kites -- Angel:Now it feels like my favourite of things –- a book of short stories loosely, loosely connected, and I will be disappointed if this book is pegged into a novelistic plot. I don’t want to go back to Zhang (at least not too often); I want new people, new experiences, in this future Socialist Union of American States; I want criminals or a nurse in a future hospital or maybe even some other kite fliers; I want more exploration of gender, of the bents and the straights; I want a far reaching set of stories rather than one deep exploration told close to the body. I loved Angel and her kite flying genius, but I need someone new.Baffin Island -- Zhang: I am fully convinced now that if this is a novel it is a novel consisting of short stories, even though two of them already follow the same guy. There is no plot to speak of, and I love that –- “Fuck plot,” I say. This is all about character and place, and places –- be they New York or Baffin Island -– are characters in this book. I continue to adore Arctic tales too, so the story of Zhang in the Arctic station doing the maintenance work for a bunch of scientists tracking whales, nearly losing his shit in the land of the noontime moon is exactly the sort of tale I am made to love. I feel the need to go North before it is completely gone, before I am gone. Enough about me: it’s a great chapter as Zhang begins to see himself, and I find myself cheering him on. I can’t wait to see what we get and where we go next.Jerusalem Station -- Martine: A commune on Mars. Crazy. Nothing prepared me for the leap from Earth to Mars, but it was deftly handled by McHugh, and it’s another place lovingly turned into a character in the tale. Martine’s goat farm/apiary, and the round about way she falls in love with (or falls in care for) Alexi and Theresa is exactingly created. It is all nuance, nuance written to capture truth in a future that almost seems like it is rather than it could be. I am officially in love with this book now. And Martine and Alexi. I have no idea what else Maureen F. McHugh has written but it is something I am going to read. (one more thing: as I finished the chapter I couldn’t help noticing the word “nurse” in the first line or two of the next chapter. I love that I am going to get my wish.)Ghost -- Zhang: The hint of a plot finally appears in Ghost—Zhang, but only because it is our third chapter following the life of Zhang. He’s in China after his stint in the Arctic, studying Engineering at the prestigious University of Nanjing, and he’s in love with his tutor, a man named Haitao. In love in a place where being “bent” is a crime that the government either Reforms Through Labour or solves with a bullet in the back of the head. Zhang seems a bit naïve about the threat and the world he’s living in, but that naïveté is gone by the time Haitao kills himself. The slightest nudge and all the gains we’ve made will tumble and we’ll be hiding in back alleys and parks all over again. It’s a fucking tightrope. This story hit me where I live.Homework -- Alexi: Goats. Goats and marriage. Goats and marriage and a tutor for Alexi’s correspondence course through the University of Nanking (a tutor named Zhang). This is, perhaps, the most banal chapter of the lot, but lovely in its simplicity, even so.Three Fragrances -- San-xiang: I can’t help thinking of my biannual re-reading of Jonathon Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Written nearly 400 years ago, Swift’s pamphlet is a catalogue of everything that is wrong with the world. Except it’s not simply a catalogue of what was wrong in his world of 1729, it is a catalogue of what’s wrong in our world of 2012. The problems are all the same. What’s wrong never changes; hence, my confidence that we are doomed to create our own extinction because we can’t change. We like to pretend things are better, but they’re not. And here’s San-xiang, face finally restructured, jaw firmly and perfectly in place, looking pretty for the first time in her life, and a predator picks out her vulnerability, and she walks inexorably into the predator's lair, and he rapes her. McHugh doesn’t shy away from telegraphing what’s to come, and that dramatic irony is what creates the suspense that pushes this story forward. When it finally happens, when Billy rapes San-xiang, but worse seems oblivious to having raped her, I felt the ache that took me to Jonathon Swift and the thought that nothing changes. Why doesn’t it? I’m convinced it is because we invariably treat symptoms rather than diseases. But I have been known to make mistakes ... from time to time.Rafael -- Zhang: I could read another three hundred pages in McHugh’s future world. The stories were that good. This final short wraps up the “novel” precisely as it should -- with life continuing for everyone in the directions they’ve chosen or had thrust upon them. There are connections that all link back to Zhang, connections to all the other players from all the other stories, that are touched with the most delicate of touches, and none of them feel too good to be true. There is no destiny at work, no impossible predetermined coming together of people from different places. They’re simply intersections and crossings between lives -– all of which make perfect sense (the sorts of things I've experienced again and again in my own life). China Mountain Zhang is about a possible world that probably won’t happen, but could. It is an act of Sci-Fi world building that I’ve rarely seen matched. But for me, Mchugh’s real achievement is the people she created. They are beautiful. The whale scientists and engineers and hustlers and Martian colonists, the wounded the harmed the foolish the suicidal the nasty the kind the living, and the dead, San-Xiang and Haitao and Invierno and Peter and Zhang. I will miss them.
3.75/5In the 22nd century, China has replaced America as the world’s dominant political, economic and cultural capital, following a political revolution in America that has displaced its capitalistic economy and brought in an era of socialism.It is an immensely well-imagined and portrayed account of a plausible future where China takes precedence over the States – the latter becomes akin to a third-world dump following a financial crisis, while China rises in economic importance, and consequently, in cultural importance. Chinese phrases, Mandarin itself, Chinese dress and cuisine and Chinese genes suddenly become the next-gen cool things, the way everything symbolizing America/the West is hip now. With the Great Cleansing Winds in the US, followed by a Second American Revolution and a Second Civil War, the status-quo is changed.Zhang Zhong Shan (Rafael), the protagonist, is a young gay man of mixed heritage, a Chinese father and Hispanic mother – born in Brooklyn and having undergone gene splicing in infancy in order to look more ‘Chinese’ (the reverse of what the Chinese are doing today – double eyelid surgery, for instance, to look more ‘Western’) and therefore attempting to gain social leverage as well as possible opportunity to study and live in China, his life takes a series of unexpected turns as he navigates through the turmoil of sexuality, cosmetically altered genes, identity and cultural legacy in and out of America, China and the Arctic.The novel takes place in roughly the same time, following different threads that sometimes merge, and sometimes merely touch each other. While Zhang comes to terms with his life, Martine and Alexis, on Mars, try to eke out a living that ensures them a different kind of security, but at the same time, demands of them a hefty price. San-Xiang, a young Chinese girl in the US struggles to come to terms with her own marginalization on account of her ugly face, and then with the consequences of her cosmetically-enhanced beauty. Haobai, perhaps, followed by San-Xiang, is the most compelling character – the social critique hits the hardest and sharpest in these characters, while it is akin to merely a pervading mist in the rest of the work.There is so much to both like and dislike in this work – there are aspects of it that sparkle throughout the text – its subtexts, its layers of thought and experience form the crux of the work – the sadness, the sarcasm, the brutality of an unequal, hypocritical world, the variously covert forms of marginalization that follow the lives of hundreds of people eking out a precarious survival. It is a story less of hope, more of the desperation to survive, merely survive – because the dream of flourishing is forbidden. Of forever having to move in the shadows, in the dark. Knowing that coming out in the light would not bestow warmth, but blister their lives, simply because they do not fit into the majority’s ideas of normalcy, of acceptability.The LGBT angle, the marginalization by making it illegal, is a double blow to the hypocrisy of the world – not just a critique of the present, but also a sharp jab at the communists’ claim of equality of all, irrespective of everything. One is constantly reminded of Orwell’s statement in Animal Farm – Everyone is equal, but some people are more equal than others.This critique of communism is also resonant in its economic critique, where despite landing as a student of the reputed Nanjing University, Zhang finds it difficult to find a decent job back in the US. As a critique of communism and its ideal of perfect equality, it is breathtaking. The critique is often thinly-veiled, making it all the more impressive in places. As a work that examines the way in which misfits are marginalized, strongly alluding to own our present times, it is truly engaging, and in some scenes, brilliant even. The politics of marginalization are acutely present throughout the work as one of its subtexts.Where this work fails to engage is primarily its plot – the world-building is pretty neat and convincing, the science part adequate to qualify as SF (climate-control equipped homes - and the Kite-flying and ball-game sequences are pure brilliance), but the plot is not linear – chronologically, it is – but it follows no clear direction, even at the end. Like the characters themselves, the reader too is clueless of the novel’s destination, which is a bad thing when it turns out at the end that the story has no coherent plot at all.Agreed, this is more of a Bildungsroman novel, but then it fails mostly on that account too. The story of Zhang is only one of the many threads of the novel, such as Martine/Alexis on Mars, Haobai in China or San-Xiang in the US, and yet, it is, despite taking up the most space, the most flimsy character. He comes out only slightly more mature than he first encounters the world’s injustices. A hugely disproportionate time is also spent upon Alexis/Martine, and though it is a charming little episode, they, or the whole existence of the Martian colony, does not in any way affect Zhang’s life, save allowing him to think in a different way of solving engineering problems.The most glaring drawback is that the story of Alexis/Martine is left incomplete, in the sense that there is no definite conclusion into what happened to their farms, which could have been used magnify even better the consequences of being pushed back onto the fringes.The most striking characters, rather, are the ones that have served as the background in Zhang’s life – San-Xiang, the ugly girl (she appears fleetingly in Zhang’s life, but does not make any impact on the way his life turns out, so in that sense her role is inconsequential to the main crux of the novel), and Zhang’s erstwhile mentor and secret lover Haobai. Their scenes are truly touching. It is primarily in these two characters and their scenes that this novel achieves its brilliance, bringing out the sadness, the thinly-veiled critiques, the helplessness and the incurable anguish of surviving on the periphery of an unforgiving society, of being utterly marginalized without hope of redemption – their stories, especially of Haobai, is dealt with astounding maturity and skill, which sort of falls flat in the case of the major character, Zhang Zhong Shan.Another major drawback of this work is in how much space is allocated to insignificant details. Cooking and eating take up an enormous time, both in the US, China and Mars – food, when used as metaphor, is a brilliant device – but gets in the way when used without significance. Almost every other page threw up pizzas, pastas, salads, noodles, tandoori chicken, burgers, poori, rice and beans, cakes and God-knows-what Thai food.While it exceeds expectations and shines bright in many places, it also falls below its own spectacular achievements in quite a lot instances. And yet, this is one book I’m glad to have read. Not one of the best, but definitely commendable. Although, I think, it has garnered adequate attention by winning the Lambda, the Locus and the Tiptree Awards, while rightly getting only a nomination for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
What do You think about China Mountain Zhang (1997)?
I should have read China Mountain Zhang a long time ago, and I'm definitely moving Nekropolis higher up my list. China Mountain Zhang is mostly about the title character, a mostly young, mostly Chinese engineer in a not-quite-dystopian future version of the world. McHugh gives us a world where economic upheaval, global climate change, and political unrest led to socialist or quasi-socialist revolutions. (There is also some colonizing of space involved, in kind of a cool way.) The majority of the book is from Zhang's point of view, but there are five other characters who offer their own looks at this new world and whose lives intersect with Zhang's to varying degrees. It's probably significant that four of them are women; China Mountain Zhang is a book perfectly aware of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity and how they shape the lived-experience. The bleakest passage in the book belongs to San-xiang, an ugly girl who is now pretty. And, indeed, there are a lot of bleak things in China Mountain Zhang, but it is certainly not a novel without hope.One of the things I really appreciate was the book's apparent lack of plot. I'll admit to skepticism about the alternate view points (I'm not terrible sympathetic, at least aesthetically, to first person narration, especially when there are several first person narrators) and I'll also admit that my skepticism was due in part to the extremely loose relationship the character threads have to each other, and even to the main thread. (On reflection, I would really like to hear more about Baffin Island.) However, this technique worked really well. I'm not a reader who thrives on plot, honestly, I like watching characters bounce off each other - and the most effective plots are usually the simplest ones (ie: everything is ruined forever). China Mountain Zhang is, in some sense, a bildungsroman - but in a very tangential sense. It is very much about people trying to work out their lives. Most sff "needs" some kind of sweeping goal, even/especially dystopian sff, but China Mountain Zhang's goals are more personal - and highly relatable. Also, I don't think this gets mentioned enough in discussions of the book, but it's actually really funny. The humor is, admittedly, mostly through Zhang's self-deprecating and sardonic throw-away comments and asides: "There had to be flies in China, I think, climbing a narrow stairway surface in black, industrial no-slip material. I just never noticed them. (Right, flies in the Wuxi Complex. A fly in Wuxi would have realized its hubris and died of embarrassment.)" It's a bit sly, very quick, and quite detail-oriented. Which makes the humor of the book very much one with the protagonist of the book, whom I love and want to be happy.
—Madeline
I always feel guilty when I quit a book halfway through, and I don't think I've ever felt guiltier than with this novel. Everything about it sounds like I would absolutely love it. But yet as I made my way through the pages, I found myself dreading my reading sessions more and more, until I just decided it was time to move on.That's not to say I don't recognize the book's strengths, and there are many. The idea of a futuristic world where China has taken over the United States is brilliant, and it's executed with brio. Ms. McHugh clearly understands Chinese culture and grasps the flavors of language. I've lived for three years in China, and I was thrilled at these aspects.Also very appealing was the protagonist, Zhang Zhong Shan. He's such a refreshing change from the usual SF tropes: he's of mixed ethnicity, gay, and an everyman in a genre that seems to prefer world-shaking Übermenschen.So, where did China Mountain Zhang go wrong with me? Two major issues.First, even though I liked the realistic, toned down nature of the characters, they just felt flat to me. They lack any ambition or spark, and feel colorless and depressing. Zhang himself was no exception. He has nothing to live for, no ambition that drives him. He's flotsam. That sounds like an interesting choice of character on paper, but it just drove me nuts reading it. I found myself growing increasingly annoyed at his flat delivery, his restraint, his lack of emotion.Second, the plot doesn't go anywhere. It wanders slowly through a world which in its scope is promising, but in its details is dull and colorless. The kite races didn't inspire wonder; there was no adrenaline to them, only some sort of detached description of going through the motions.All that being said, I can't shake the feeling that this book was great, but I was just not a great enough reader to appreciate it. China Mountain Zhang, it's not you, it's me. I hope you go on to better readers who will show you the love you deserve.
—Daniel Roy
This book is one of those that sneak into your high regard. It's not flashy or sensational, it's just very real. The author has the knack of writing characters you care about. All the various subplots weave together, touching at points. You find that you care deeply about what happens to each of them, and the story of their struggles, their loves, and their accomplishments makes really good reading. The world is extremely well-built and realistic. I totally do think China will be the world's main power in not too many more years. Everything about it feels true. While I was disappointed at the story of my favorite character, the supervisor's daughter, (I thought she got a raw deal, and I would have liked to get more resolution on her story line), I found all the plot-lines engrossing. I want to know, too, what happened to the goats, and if the Martian contingent was able to get their system repaired or replaced in time to prevent any harm to the goats or people.I thought it was interesting how the author chose a gay man for her title character. I thought it was sad that she depicted a world in which gays are no more accepted than they are today in ours. I would have hoped in 250 years or so that things would be better than that for gays and also for women. But not so.In all things the book is understated. The struggle is not to save the world or to battle evil, but just to find a place, to make some room in the world in which the characters can live. In that way it's very like our own struggles in life, to earn a living, to pay medical expenses, and so on. It's a book that bears thinking about, one that grows in the imagination, and in the depth of the characters portrayed. I really liked this book.
—Tatiana
