China Mountain Zhang

This was the book club pick for September, and this is yet another off-my-radar pick. I found some moments in this book extremely engaging but I did not like the overall structure or the mosiac/pastiche style of storytelling. This is a book that is not constrained in any way by its choice of genre and is absolutely one of the most unique SF books I've read so far. This is also a book that lacks a plot and is more of a coming-of-age type of story.

China Mountain Zhang, Zhang or Rafael for short, is the name of the main character, and as explained in the book it's like being named “George Washington Jefferson” or “Joseph Stalin Lenin” just in a Chinese context. Zhang is a gay man working as a construction tech in New York City, he lives with an ex-boyfriend who is his only real friend. The twist is that the US has had a socialist revolution and China is the dominant world power, which means being Chinese is an advantage, and being gay will get you sent to the labor camp. We follow Zhang as he leaves his job as a construction tech to work in the Arctic Circle in hopes of earning a position in a China-based engineering college. This story takes us all over this world, from the frozen north to mainland China to Mars to Coney Island.

Can you believe this got a Hugo nod? I do, this is the book equivalent of Oscar bait. Let's run the checklist while keeping in mind this was published in 1992: This book features a non-standard narrative structure, this book features a gay main character, this book embraces multiculturalism despite the Chinese-dominated world it's set in, and the book has some keen/plausible technological extrapolation. It was so far ahead of its time, and hindsight really helps to highlight this as a predictor of the trends to come in SF.

All that said, it doesn't mean that this is a good read. Whatever virtues made it unique and fresh in 1992 have basically all been adopted in some way by modern storytellers. In 2023 it reads dated, it's like the author focused so much on making their book different from standard SF fare that they forgot to include a plot. Reading this reminded me of eating cookie dough, it's sweet and digestible but I would have preferred it fully baked. The book is extremely dreamlike, with hints and nudges concerning the larger world but never outright explaining it in full detail. This is definitely a personal journey for Zhang but it felt like he didn't really get a complete character arc. This feeling I have is probably being amplified by the change in perspective every other chapter.

I usually like it when the point of a story is a little understated, but there is a difference between burying the lede and never getting to the point. CMZ is guilty of the latter, there is never a moment in the book where Zhang confronts the world around him. The fate of his boyfriend in China and his first lecture are the closest this book ever gets to commenting on the world it has imagined for us. The problem is that those moments are also pulling double duty; They are supposed to be cathartic moments but they are also ironically the moments where the book introduces the concept it is commenting on. This book DOES make social commentary, it's just in the details and not loud enough.

TL;DR: This is Oscar bait in book form. There's a point to this book but good luck finding it.

Another one of those books that remind me why I've stuck with the S&L book club for so long. I'd never heard of Maureen F. McHugh, as unlikely to ever hear of her at this stage. The book isn't in my library, isn't available in audio, and I don't know any fans of her work to clue me in. And this book is great. Her prose and internal monologue overcomes the dated feel to the science fiction aspects (a 45 minute delay to print out your messages.... oh 1992, if you could see us now). The mosaic layering, rich characters, and worldbuilding around of the humdrum everyday life in a communist-dominant world, though, all made this a fantastic read for me.

That said, it is a book about a mixed race gay man written by a white woman, which is always a bit of a red flag. It's progressive for its time, but I'd be curious to hear reviews from people of Chinese descent and the LGBTQ+ community. There wasn't anything to trip my own yikes meter, but I'm a cishet white woman too, so my meter only goes so far.

I would advise you to check the trigger warnings or skip “Three Fragrances,” however if you're in need of such things.

The (very) good: it perfectly and subtly depicts the way life is in a half-hearted tired communist state, with the mixture of fear/constant threat/guilt for being slightly different and apparent normalcy that can hardly be understood by those not living through it; it also catches the atmosphere of gloom and its effects (depression, suicide) and the constant desperation to do something to hide that from one's own mind. Some characters are well drawn and the reader gets to genuinely care about them. The writing is excellent, realistic but fluid. 4,5/5 there. But:
The bad: the use of way too many first-person points of view is unusual in a tiresome and unnecessary way. Some are totally useless, go nowhere and should have been cut out (the Angel and San Xiang chapters). The rhythm, already quite slow, does not keep up constantly.
The worse: it is not really science fiction; the scifi elements are too few, too low-key, lame/uninteresting and actually just there to offer the pretext for the background.
The worst: the end leaves some story lines unfinished, not in a ”what if?” sense, but in a ”the author did not feel like writing the book any more” way. For example, there is a lot of build up in a life threatening situation on a colony on Mars, where something is wrong and the characters try to find out what and, well, not die, and then... the book ends. What was actually wrong? Was it solved and how? Did they die? We will never know, cause the story just is not continued. Why all the build up then? And it is not the only story line started and not really going somewhere.
To sum up, I really enjoyed reading it and wanted much more of it; but that went on through a constant struggle with some uninspired auctorial choices, so in the end it feels more like a 3,5/5.