And the stories are themselves something of a sandwich, encased top and bottom with tales told by Christina that introduce and revisit many of the book’s themes.īecause working incessantly isn’t enough to make ends meet, Christina’s parents steal the sachets from supermarket ramen to flavour their rice. A fifth girl lives in the same house, resenting her mother for taking in so many “strays”, while the sixth, Jenny, is linked when her family befriends Christina’s parents, who teach them the art of dumpster diving.Ĭhristina sleeps between her parents, a hot dog in a bun, they say, a slice of turkey between cheese and lettuce. This room, barely bigger than the five mattresses laid out on its floor, connects four of Sour Heart’s six protagonists. She was overdressed that night, too glamorous for the squalor around her, much like the protagonists in her stories, first-generation Chinese girls in Brooklyn and Queens, shaking off the cockroaches they crush in their sleep by “swinging our arms in the air as if we were ballerinas”, defiant of poverty’s indignities.Ĭhristina is five-years-old and entering her second year in America when her family finds a room to share in Washington Heights.

Jenny Zhang in face-kini (Image: Instagram) We were both on the periphery of the Iowa Writers Workshop - me visiting Alice Miller, a graduate of the Institute of Modern Letters attending on a Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship (the year before Eleanor Catton did the same), and she scoping out the place in mid-summer before starting there in the fall. She was in a royal blue dress that would’ve made more sense in an actual Yacht Club and no one was talking to her, something I noticed because no one was talking to me either. I first met Zhang in 2007 at the Yacht Club, a basement dive bar in Iowa City, about 1000 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Writing this article is making me queasy.

Suddenly, letting me write her Instagram captions seemed like a really dumb idea. Instead of feeling excited for her, I felt a spike of anxiety - no face-kini can protect you from that level of exposure.

Padma Lakshmi served Chnese food at Zhang’s book launch after party. The book of short stories, which the New Yorker called “astounding”, has quotes from Dunham and Miranda July on the cover. She’s the author of Sour Heart, the first title published by Lena Dunham’s new imprint, Lenny, at Random House.

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang