Maureen F. McHugh

On a twenty-second-century Earth and Mars dominated by global Chinese hegemony, extraordinary individuals struggle to find their places in their cracking world order

China Mountain Zhang

Lindy

When I finished reading this book six months ago, I judged it as a solid novel with slightly above average characters and a slightly below average plot. I did not expect that this story about ordinary people trying to get on with their average lives in a world that is largely indifferent to them would linger with me like it has, and I have gained a fuller appreciation for the depth of McHugh's worldbuilding, elements of which she only reveals when necessary and appropriate. The quietly conflicting forces of isolation and love wind throughout all strands of the novel and lends the same very human, but melancholy, sentiment I so enjoy in The Man who Fell to Earth.

Gavin

Simple, loveable SF. McHugh does not truck much with symbols: she just executes one theme and a bucket of naturalistic detail really well. Mostly a serviceable replacement. The scifi is extremely unobtrusive. It's also a friendly primer on Chinese culture; she even teaches you some starchy Mandarin.

Her theme: invert the current positions of China and America; culturally, economically. Following economic collapse and a popular uprising, America gets colonised by China. 

  “I went to the Brooklyn Middle School of Theory and History and all of our classes were in Mandarin”

The effect is to make the western reader feel the Chinese condition. Politically Freaky Friday. Kitchen Sink Red Dawn.

  The Soviet Union also went into bankruptcy because it was deeply invested in the U.S. bond market, whatever that was," they all laugh, we've all been taught that the U.S.S.R. was deeply hurt in the economic collapse because of their involvement in the U.S. bond market, but I'll be damned if I ever met anyone who really knew what that meant.

McHugh is neither alarmist nor tankie about this. Her socialist system is does some things right - but contrary to the undying dream of teen radicals, it's also way more racist and homophobic than the current system. Modern racism, too (i.e. unspoken). 

  As one goes further up in any hierarchy, one meets more and more ethnically Chinese people.

The main drama all comes from Zhang just trying to be gay in New York. (“They'll send him to Xinjiang Province, to Reform Through Labor”.) That and poverty. (The welfare system is depicted as realistically shitty, conditional, degraded, insufficient.)

There's some mind control stuff going on, but oddly restrained:

  “There is a fine line, she explains, between too much activity which would overwhelm my system and too little which would mean that the new kidneys would not grow. I take all of this placidly.
"Dr. Cui," I say, "you are controlling my moods, aren't you."
She pats my hand, the first time she has touched me that I remember. "Of course, you are new here, alone, ill. If we didn't you would be frightened and depressed”

This and the wirehead gambling den makes this book the most subtle cyberpunk novel ever.


  “your life says something about your politics whether you think about them or not. You can either just let that happen or you can think about the kind of choices you want to make."
"I'd like to continue to make my choices because they fit my life rather than out of some sense of ideology”



“I am exhausted and angry and full of a hard, terrible joy. We have survived. Yes, it was luck as much as anything else, but we made our own luck. The chain and tackle system dangles in lines and shadows all around us, the light slowly brightens above us. There is a purity of form and line; reality, hard lean reality is very beautiful.”

“Students in a university live transient and comparatively marginal existences. That is true the world over. A university is concerned with preparation for the future and there is an underlying philosophy that overcrowded living conditions and a lack of the comforts of the middle class is not only excused but somehow educational. In Brooklyn, students who lived at school”


McHugh lived in China and keenly observed some things, like how deep-seated it is to be apolitical:

  “Take for example the diagram behind me on the board. Does anyone recognize it?"
They all look at me, blank. Of course they all recognize it. But it's politics. Nobody in their right mind is going to volunteer anything about politics. Keep your head down, don't get into trouble. Nervousness makes me a tyrant, I point at one young woman. "Tell me what it means."
She looks around, hoping for escape. Normally I'd feel sympathy for her but now I am only concerned with how to fill another fifteen minutes.
"Ah, it's Marx's analysis”

It actually gets a bit much, she explains things that could have been indicated:

  China is obsessed with walls. The university is walled, every factory, every school, every office complex or hotel is surrounded by a wall.


“I don't believe in socialism but I don't believe in capitalism either. We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.”


Its depictions of the feeling of entrepreneurship and the huge difference in dignity that having in-demand skills gives you are great: these feelings are rare in art.
(view spoiler)[Ends on a beautiful portrait of the joy of working for yourself, of realising you can start something, that you have served your time in organisations:

I feel curiously light... If this project sells, the fee will allow us to put a down payment on a system. A small system, but that will be better than going to the library. And I can talk to someone at Brooklyn College, maybe my ABC or my girl from Brooklyn could get credit as a student intern and I'll have someone to do some of the donkey work; the checking up on materials and all that. Eventually we're going to need a clerk. And Cinnabar said we'll have to file papers and get permits for the new company. We're going to call it Daoist Engineering...

“Una luz brillara en tu camina. Descubre lo que te has perdido." A brilliant light in your path. Discover what you have lost.

The light angles across Brooklyn, red now. It comes through the train windows. Sunset used to depress me. But I learned in Baffin Island, you've just got to remember the light, keep it inside you, and wait. The sun comes back every morning.

 (hide spoiler)]

The sky doesn't fall: the mildly shitty, mildly oppressive machine remains unchanged at the end. Zhang becomes a confident artist and intellectual. There's yer lot.

(Might be the simplest book I have ever given 4 stars.)

Fraser Simons

China Mountain Zhang is the name of the main character, often referred to just as Zhang (J AH ng). Zhang, or Rafael, as he is of mixed heritage, is an ABC (American Born Chinese) who lives in New York in a world in which China has risen as the dominant world power. America's capitalism has collapsed and the result is the spread of a socialist state, presumably across the globe, but certainly in parts of the United States, including New York.

What makes this book really sing and differentiate itself from other cyberpunk and post cyberpunk also really help to create a world that feels very real, in that it is also mundane and therefore relatable. The technology has not radically altered life, especially for marginalized individuals like Zhang. Not only does he not have the advantage of being purely Chinese, as his mother is Hispanic and his father Chinese, but he is also a gay man, or "bent." At the same time he also "passes" for Chinese, which affords him some benefits of society in a China dominated world. at the same time knowing that more scrutiny would reveal that he's a deviant, as they also call it. 

The book follows a few characters in the world, generally moving the narrative forward by years at a time before we come back to Zhang's life again. What is truly striking about the world is that it becomes so believable both because of the problems we already have in a capitalistic society, but also the small details that are placed throughout the world. It truly makes the world seem tedious, laborious, dejected. The change from capitalism to socialism has not actually changed much, or made people as we see them in the novel, happy. There is a pervasive fear regarding gender and sexual orientation. There is still a very clear stratification of class. There is the sense of being an "optimal" citizen by being a good worker. Labour is still not heavily rewarded. Not much then, has changed.

What the book slowly becomes about while continuing to show the marginalized characters in this world while all the while, by the way, never filling in the details of how the world got like this until near the end. There are Kite Races, where viewers go and jack into people racing for their lives as they too are linked to the gliders they use to fly. Feeling the pain and aches of the glider as they soar for the pleasure of the audience. It still feels like capitalism. Entertainers make money and are chewed up and spit out at the audience's whims. Technology is used by humanity for various purposes making people's lives easier, while still contributing to their oppression. It is very much the same as we have now. 

While most cyberpunk stories revolve around technology, China Mountain Zhang instead shows you how much the real problem are societal structures and our own complacency in them. How the characters reinforce them, how they are oppressed by them. From a commune on Mars, to the promised land: China itself. Most everyone is trying to study and work there, and everyone has an underlying sense of being scrutinized for all of their decisions, relationships, and status in their environment. A Chinese woman facing problems in New York has a chapter. She is perceived as ugly, and when modern technology makes her "beautiful," she is taken advantage of basically immediately by a man. While this illustrates her point nicely, it was really on the nose and clearly for a story beat. It is irrefutable that attractive women deal with these things today, as they do in a futuristic socialist society. However, I think that it is a misstep to have this message wrapped up so perfectly with this character who isn't given much screen time, and the continual reiteration of how ugly she is...makes it seem as though the implication that only attractive women would suffer abuse of this kind. All the other characters were great and their purposes reinforced by the larger narrative.

In a way, this is the darkest cyberpunk book I've ever read by rooting it all in a world that looks and feels just like ours, even as it was written in '92. The ways in which everyone is oppressed are simply facts of life. There is no real struggle against these machinations; the struggle is for these people to try to find happiness within these established structures, just as people do similarly now. They are all punks in that they are all apart from their respective communities and society in some way and they are all oppressed. But they are not people that take up arms against them. Their resistance and their respective battles are literally their lives. It is not glamorous or romanticized. Eeking out an existence has never been so interesting, poetic, and riveting. This take on what a punk is, is something I resonate with and happily consume. 

5/5

China Mountain Zhang

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