![]() ![]() Rosabel traced the lineage of Sour Heart – it is a descendent of that ‘singular story of immigrant struggle then success’, of ‘an Asian angel making it in the white world’, but this work was refreshing in that it ‘resists this as the primary narrative’. This brief span of time is ripe for literature – where there is a freedom, a blissful ignorance of labels like Asian and immigrant. It is not long before ‘someone makes you aware it is something else’. So why focus on this period? Because the time a young girl can be innocent, Jenny explained, the time when the body is just a vessel that gets you from A to B, is incredibly short. Sour Heart is a collection of seven loosely connected stories of six young girls from the immigrant community, young girls on the cusp of puberty. ![]() ![]() The audience was treated to an intelligent and illuminating two-way conversation, where Rosabel Tan asked questions that engaged both with Jenny’s work and the wider societal context in which it was created and received. But, also like the book, it was not cloying or earnest or too serious, for Jenny is funny. In keeping with the nuances of the book, this session examined burdens and privilege, pushes and pulls, the grey areas of Jenny’s experience. Jenny Zhang’s work has been described as ‘obscene, beautiful, moving’ – familial co-dependence, suffocation, love and cruelty all intermingle in vivid prose. ![]()
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