Ada Zhang
Fiction
Brooklyn, NY
My short story collection, titled The Sorrows of Others, explores the emotional landscapes of foreignness, loneliness, home, and loss. The characters are young and old, and their stories weave across the Chinese-American experience, the Chinese immigrant experience, and the experiences of people living in China now, in the years since the country opened its doors after the Cultural Revolution. In Compromise, a woman takes care of her sick husband after he’s been gone for eighteen years. The main character in Propriety loses her virginity in the hopes that abandoning her youth will also distance herself from her mother. In the title story, a widower marries a woman from his hometown and takes solace in her strangeness.
In their own ways, these stories are all obsessed with place. They ask what happens when we leave some place, what happens when we never leave, and what happens when we return. What selves do we meet and what selves do we sacrifice in that process?
I recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before that, for three years I was a children’s book editor at Sterling Publishing. The uninterrupted writing time at Ragdale will provide me with the physical as well as mental and emotional space so that I can focus on my work and give this project the final push it needs to reach the finish line
Work Sample
The summer before my junior year, I moved out of the dorms in Baxter Hall on the corner of Broadway and East 10th and took a room in a small house on Cherry Avenue, Flushing, Queens. I told my friends it was to save money, and they didn’t ask why I didn’t move to Brooklyn or Long Island City. Anywhere would have been closer. I suppose it was a point of pride among my college friends to live frugally even if it was selective. Even if it was abstract, since it was our parents’ money we were spending every time we went out, our parents who paid our rents. But we were all young back then, and I regarded hardship the same way I regarded my own shadow. I was aware of it, but rarely thought of it. Either way, it did not frighten me.