Ada Zhang

Set in China and America, in the generations after the Cultural Revolution, The Sorrows of Others is a dazzling collection about people confronted with being outsiders--as immigrants, as revolutionaries, and even, often, within their own families. In New York City, an art student finds an unexpected subject when she moves in with a grandmother from Xi'an, and boundaries are put into question. When a newlywed couple moves to Arizona, adapting to unfamiliar customs keeps their marriage from falling apart. A woman grapples with what it means to care for another, and the limits of that care, when her dying husband returns from Beijing years after abandoning her. And during a rainy summer in Texas, a visitor exposes the unspoken but unburiable history that binds two families together. Ada Zhang writes with startling honesty and love about lives young and old, in a stunning debut that explores what happens when we leave home and what happens when we stay, and the selves we meet and shed in the process of becoming.

The Sorrows of Others

Relay Majulah

This short story collection explores feelings of foreignness, loneliness, home, and loss. In one story, a woman takes care of her sick husband after he has been gone for eighteen years. In another, a college student paints an elderly woman, for reasons that don't become clear until much later. The title story is about a widower who remarries without love, but who discovers, in his new marriage, something better, a companion for his grief. These stories are all, in essence, about place. They ask what happens when we leave somewhere, what happens when we return, and what happens when we choose to stay. The stories all occur at some point of intersection--where one world, or one self, meets another. --page iv.

Ada Zhang

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