China Mountain Zhang

for the longest time, i ding-dong-diddily could NOT remember the name of this book. but I remember the moniker the key character was marked with, "ABC- American Born Chinese". And being of hispanic ethnic descent, at the time, I thought, "man, that's gotta be like some f%@#ed up ethnicity to deal with in the US- being Mexican-American is bad enough; never Mexican enough for Mexicans, and never American enough for Americans. but that's a whole 'nother level." And now, 20 years later, in an area where Asian immigration is easily noticed despite the stew of immigration and multiculturalism abounding, it's not ABC's under siege, it's Muslims and Mexicans. Some things never change. But, it's easy to see how their time will come- especially given the rise of Grievance Politics and Blame The Foreigner tactics. All fear tactics, and with humans, always effective. So, I recall this book being prescient in so many ways. I look forward to reading it again, and seeing how it's aged (haven't read since the original publication). A bit like Lewis Shiner I think. Not in content but context.

"China Mountain Zhang" is not another scifi adventure book (which definitely have a place when I want mindless entertainment). It's speculative fiction at its best. The author asks "What if the world were like this...?" and answers the question in such an interesting and believable way. Other readers posting reviews have objected to the plot, to the society and politics, to the various relationships. I found this book like a series of biographies. What this book lacks is not plot but length. (I want more.) I found the politics, a blended world of socialism, capitalism, and racism, to be very interesting. I found the relationships interesting. A couple deals with homosexuality in their relationship. A single woman deals with disfigurement, internalised self-hatred, and date rape. A couple on Mars have to get past economic issues to further their relationship. Through it all, the author speculates some imaginative technology. I loved this book when I first read it, and loved it when I re-read it ten years later. Whereas I usually donate my used science fiction to the local library, this is a book that I have hung onto. I hope to reread it in another ten years, or so.

This book had been on my "to read" list for some time, but it moved to the top of the list after a co-worker, a rabid right-winger, read it and then fulminated against the notion that the U.S. could ever become a socialist state. The First Amendment doesn't protect anti-Americanism, he said, and the book should be banned and the author arrested. Actually, I believe he would have been quite comfortable in the authoritarian future America in which Zhong Shan Zhang lives and works. "Zhong Shan" translates to "China Mountain," but it's also the Mandarin version of the Cantonese name "Sun Yat Sen." It's like an American being named "George Washington Jones." Zhang is an ABC -- an American-born Chinese -- who gets by, barely, as a Construction Tech in New York. More important, he's only half-Chinese; his mother was Hispanic, but his genetic inheritance from his Chinese father was enhanced by gene-splicing. Since all the best jobs and top corporate positions go to Chinese (the most racist people in the world), every little bit helps. But even more important than his problematical background, Zhang is set apart by being gay -- in a world in which deviance is dealt with by exile to the Mars colony or by a bullet in the back of the head. The plot line is really pretty simple: Zhang loses his job after his boss tries to fix him up with his extremely ugly daughter (who doesn't know about his sexual orientation), he takes a job in semi-desperation as the only Construction Tech at a research station above the Arctic Circle (where he learns to value the dawn after five months of darkness), he parlays his hardship assignment into admission to Nanjing University to study engineering (where he finally begins to flower as a Daoist engineer/architect), and he returns to New York in search of long-delayed professional success and personal fulfillment. It's the richness of the author's portrayal of a possible, quite believable future that make this book so fascinating: The details of kite-racing, the fundamental differences between Chinese and Western attitudes (McHugh studied for some time in the PRC), the mix of very high-tech and very low, the internal politics of a commune on Mars, and the sheer prosaic-ness of people just trying to get by, to survive in a largely uncaring world. Zhang is a fully realized character, but so are his friends and acquaintances. And so are the other major characters in New York and on Mars, all of whose stories gradually come together late in the book. This is a beautiful piece of writing.

China Mountain Zhang is about ordinary people in an extraordinary world. It's all too easy in fiction to concentrate on the unnusual, on the heroes, on the 'big' picture. What is harder is to get inside the lives of those at the bottom, the ordinary people for whom life is not adventurous, but dull, slow and difficult. Zhang is human, not superhuman; his dilemma is not how to change the world or how to save civilization as we know it, but how to find a place for himself. There is plot, and there is resolution (contrary to what some seem to think), but the plot is subtle, and the resolution emotional, not only for Zhang, but also for the reader. This is a book that works as much by getting us to understand Zhang as by inspiring questions and emotions in ourselves. It's political, but the politics are personal, micro-level, those things that impact on everyone. As an evocation of the mundane sadness and suffering, hope and resolution in daily life, this book is not only unequalled in sci-fi, but is also up there with the best writing in any genre.

A number of the reviewers of this book on this site have commented on this novel's lack of plot. This is unfair. It has plot to spare, just not the sort of simple, follow-the-numbers plotline most of today's TV-raised readers seem to need. As a novel, it reads more as a slice of life (or lives) than a self-contained story, and from the perspective of a science fiction reader, this can serve (and does so here) to make the singular impact of this book one of total immersion in a well-thought-out, self-consistent future world. As an example of science fiction as extrapolation from the present, I can think of few works as good as this. As for this novel being an example of "gay and lesbian" fiction, one of the main characters happens to be gay. It is certainly a defining characteristic, especially in the future presented here, where homosexuality is again driven underground. I think we can gain some perspective on comments like this, however, from the fact that although most of the major characters are Chinese, no one has thought to characterize this novel as "Chinese fiction." All in all, China Mountain Zhang is a fine novel, with a narrative voice startlingly well-developed for a first-time novelist. I give this my highest recommendation--not the stuff of science-fiction adventure, but rewarding for those who care about finely crafted fiction.

Commentator Dick Oliver faults the book for having no strong plot elements - but that's exactly why this book is so revolutionary. You can take or leave all of the characters, situations, actions and locations because they don't really matter to "China Mountain Zhang." What's really happening here is one of those exceedingly rare stories that reads like real life - the main characters move and grow throughout the book, never knowing exactly what's going to happen next. By the end of the book the characters are older, more mature, more confident, and you have come to care about China Mountain very deeply. No dragons have been slain, no worlds saved - just life and living the best one can. Does this mean his story is over? Not at all. You know life will go on. This is a book that screams for a sequel.