Customer Reviews

China Mountain Zhang

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

A number of the reviewers of this book on this site have commented on this novel's lack of plot. This is unfair. It has plot to spare, just not the sort of simple, follow-the-numbers plotline most of today's TV-raised readers seem to need. As a novel, it reads more as a slice of life (or lives) than a self-contained story, and from the perspective of a science fiction reader, this can serve (and does so here) to make the singular impact of this book one of total immersion in a well-thought-out, self-consistent future world. As an example of science fiction as extrapolation from the present, I can think of few works as good as this. As for this novel being an example of "gay and lesbian" fiction, one of the main characters happens to be gay. It is certainly a defining characteristic, especially in the future presented here, where homosexuality is again driven underground. I think we can gain some perspective on comments like this, however, from the fact that although most of the major characters are Chinese, no one has thought to characterize this novel as "Chinese fiction." All in all, China Mountain Zhang is a fine novel, with a narrative voice startlingly well-developed for a first-time novelist. I give this my highest recommendation--not the stuff of science-fiction adventure, but rewarding for those who care about finely crafted fiction.

"China Mountain Zhang" is not another scifi adventure book (which definitely have a place when I want mindless entertainment). It's speculative fiction at its best. The author asks "What if the world were like this...?" and answers the question in such an interesting and believable way.
Other readers posting reviews have objected to the plot, to the society and politics, to the various relationships. I found this book like a series of biographies. What this book lacks is not plot but length. (I want more.) I found the politics, a blended world of socialism, capitalism, and racism, to be very interesting. I found the relationships interesting. A couple deals with homosexuality in their relationship. A single woman deals with disfigurement, internalised self-hatred, and date rape. A couple on Mars have to get past economic issues to further their relationship. Through it all, the author speculates some imaginative technology.
I loved this book when I first read it, and loved it when I re-read it ten years later. Whereas I usually donate my used science fiction to the local library, this is a book that I have hung onto. I hope to reread it in another ten years, or so.

China Mountain Zhang is about ordinary people in an extraordinary world. It's all too easy in fiction to concentrate on the unnusual, on the heroes, on the 'big' picture. What is harder is to get inside the lives of those at the bottom, the ordinary people for whom life is not adventurous, but dull, slow and difficult. Zhang is human, not superhuman; his dilemma is not how to change the world or how to save civilization as we know it, but how to find a place for himself. There is plot, and there is resolution (contrary to what some seem to think), but the plot is subtle, and the resolution emotional, not only for Zhang, but also for the reader. This is a book that works as much by getting us to understand Zhang as by inspiring questions and emotions in ourselves. It's political, but the politics are personal, micro-level, those things that impact on everyone. As an evocation of the mundane sadness and suffering, hope and resolution in daily life, this book is not only unequalled in sci-fi, but is also up there with the best writing in any genre.

This book had been on my "to read" list for some time, but it moved to the top of the list after a co-worker, a rabid right-winger, read it and then fulminated against the notion that the U.S. could ever become a socialist state. The First Amendment doesn't protect anti-Americanism, he said, and the book should be banned and the author arrested. Actually, I believe he would have been quite comfortable in the authoritarian future America in which Zhong Shan Zhang lives and works. "Zhong Shan" translates to "China Mountain," but it's also the Mandarin version of the Cantonese name "Sun Yat Sen." It's like an American being named "George Washington Jones." Zhang is an ABC -- an American-born Chinese -- who gets by, barely, as a Construction Tech in New York. More important, he's only half-Chinese; his mother was Hispanic, but his genetic inheritance from his Chinese father was enhanced by gene-splicing. Since all the best jobs and top corporate positions go to Chinese (the most racist people in the world), every little bit helps. But even more important than his problematical background, Zhang is set apart by being gay -- in a world in which deviance is dealt with by exile to the Mars colony or by a bullet in the back of the head. The plot line is really pretty simple: Zhang loses his job after his boss tries to fix him up with his extremely ugly daughter (who doesn't know about his sexual orientation), he takes a job in semi-desperation as the only Construction Tech at a research station above the Arctic Circle (where he learns to value the dawn after five months of darkness), he parlays his hardship assignment into admission to Nanjing University to study engineering (where he finally begins to flower as a Daoist engineer/architect), and he returns to New York in search of long-delayed professional success and personal fulfillment. It's the richness of the author's portrayal of a possible, quite believable future that make this book so fascinating: The details of kite-racing, the fundamental differences between Chinese and Western attitudes (McHugh studied for some time in the PRC), the mix of very high-tech and very low, the internal politics of a commune on Mars, and the sheer prosaic-ness of people just trying to get by, to survive in a largely uncaring world. Zhang is a fully realized character, but so are his friends and acquaintances. And so are the other major characters in New York and on Mars, all of whose stories gradually come together late in the book. This is a beautiful piece of writing.

this book depends more on its exquisite characterizations and fascinating vision of a future where china dominates as the global superpower than on plot, and it totally works. it presents a "slice of life" of zhang, a gay half-chinese american, as he navigates a world in which his sexuality and americanness make him not the ideal. along the way, it also gives glimpses into the worlds of a cyber-kite flyer, martain settlers, and an "ugly" chinese expatriate trying to make her way as a young adult in america. interesting technologies and cultures. beautifully written and imagined.

Commentator Dick Oliver faults the book for having no strong plot elements - but that's exactly why this book is so revolutionary.

You can take or leave all of the characters, situations, actions and locations because they don't really matter to "China Mountain Zhang." What's really happening here is one of those exceedingly rare stories that reads like real life - the main characters move and grow throughout the book, never knowing exactly what's going to happen next. By the end of the book the characters are older, more mature, more confident, and you have come to care about China Mountain very deeply. No dragons have been slain, no worlds saved - just life and living the best one can. Does this mean his story is over? Not at all. You know life will go on.

This is a book that screams for a sequel.

This was a good read. It had an engaging style and believable characters. I read through the whole thing, enjoying it thoroughly, before it even clicked that this book doesn't have an overall plot. If you decide to pick it up trust me, plot or no plot, you'll like it.

In a style reminiscent of Jan Myrdal's "Report from a Chinese Village", McHugh has collected tome tangentially related vignettes of life in a future world dominated by China and Chinese culture, complete with its bigotry and socialist ideology. One set of characters interacts in a somewhat terraformed Mars, but the principal characters are mostly in NYC, occasionally in PRC, once even on Baffin Island. Generally well done, but the writing and editing could be tighter.

Highly enjoyable character portraits painted with a fine camelhair brush. Within a few pages, I was 'jacked' into this book much like the groupies that jacked into the experiences of the gladiator-kite-cyborgs that raced to live. The scenes and the science are painted carefully but not so completely as to dilute the reader's curiosity. Ms. McHugh is in danger of being sent to Mars to tend goats by the distinct-plot-demanders. But the tapestry of this plausible future populated by plausible beings is quite plausibly complete in itself. This book succeeds and that bodes well for my reading future.

This book is about a slightly far-fetched, but wonderfully well-envisioned future. Maureen McHugh has the talent of making one feel thoroughly immersed in the main characters' universe without using any of the verbal trickery or shock tactics habitually employed by her contemporaries in the so-called 'cyberpunk' movement. There's a very singular strangeness about the world as she imagines it being run by the communist Chinese, and I found myself puzzled by the end as to whether this came from the fact that such an arrangement normally would seem so unlikely, or from the fact that McHugh made it seem like such a natural development out of present cultural and economic trends.

I can see how the novel's plotlessness and the sense of irresolution that one gets at the end might have been off-putting to some, but I found that Zhang himself was the sort of character to whom this style of narrative was best suited - he's reflective without being particularly deep, and ambitious without being particularly resolute. I did want to know more about him than I'd found out by the end of the book, and about the two fascinating characters who form the book's weirdly free-floating sub-plot (which takes place on Mars). But this can't be considered a weakness of the novel, surely.