The Sorrows of Others, Ada Zhang's first book, is a startling collection of 10 luminous short stories about memory, alienation, and homecomings. In "The Subject," an art student finds an interesting--and unsettling--interview subject in her grandmother, who speaks about her memories from her time in Xi'an. "Sister Machinery" tells the story of the youngest in a trio of sisters, who grapples with her feelings of grief and isolation within her own family after her middle sister dies in a tragic accident. A long-time widower in the titular "The Sorrows of Others" agrees to marry a woman his daughter finds and is surprised to discover the woman's unfamiliarity to be a kind of comfort.
Zhang's crisp writing delights in physical clarity even as it plumbs emotional depths. The young woman undergoing a complex coming-of-age in "Propriety" reacts to her mother's voice by seeing details: "the water rings on the coffee table, a California-shaped stain on the pillow where my phone had been sitting.... An orange paper lantern hung from the ceiling in the kitchen, the Chinese symbol for love painted on it." As is true for the first-person narrator of this story, these small details will keep Zhang's readers focused, even as the emotional heft of these stories threatens to untether them. It is this same precision that lets stories like "One Day"--about being an outsider, finding unexpected empathy, and losing a father--to click into place in a deceptively short set of four pages. Like a flash, these stories are a burst of light, ending almost as soon as they start, but they leave a strong afterglow. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor