‘Women, Seated’ Shows How Precarity, Wealth, and ‘Having It All’ Are Not Just American Problems

Yu Ling, who grew up in a small town and whose father was a driver, never had artistic ambitions of her own, and she finds Qin Wen’s paintings (along with those of Alice Neel, whose work inspires Qin Wen’s) mystifying and unappealing. But she’s not without her own interests: Yu Ling loves cooking in the house’s state-of-the-art kitchen, specifically experimenting with Western recipes that align with the family’s ultra-rich, Westernized lifestyle. This interest, though a form of art itself, is in the service of her employers, a practical skill above all. But like her entire life in this house, she is keenly aware that the kitchen is not hers, and she’d never be able to afford a similar set-up on her own. 

“That’s why being a nanny or chauffeur is such a cruel job,” she reflects. “You get immersed in a different way of life … but this only makes you look ridiculous when you’re back to your own existence.” While she finds pleasure in her culinary efforts, she knows they represent a kind of vacation from the “real life” to which she assumes she will one day return. Her existence is marked not only by the cruelty she identifies, but by a feeling of absurdity as a result of temporarily crossing class barriers.

Zhang’s book is the first in a new series of translated works by Chinese authors from Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. The project, headed by editor Han Zhang, aims to bring Chinese authors into conversation with other writers whose work has been translated for English-language audiences. 

While translated works make up only around 3% of published books in the United States, some authors of works in translation, like Elena Ferrante, have achieved immense popularity and acclaim in English. In recent years, East Asian authors have begun to break the stranglehold that European writers have previously exerted over translated literature, particularly Japanese and South Korean women writers—like Han Kang, who last year became the first South Korean winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Mieko Kawakami and Sayaka Murata.

Strikingly, however, Chinese authors have mostly been absent from this cultural conversation. Riverhead’s initiative seeks to change that, and is bringing more works of Chinese fiction to U.S. audiences, with a focus on contemporary storytelling. Zhang’s novel is thematically similar to other novels by Asian women authors that have found success in the U.S. market: Women, Seated is a sharp examination of gender and class in the society in which it takes place.

Credit: Riverhead

Zhang, 42, has published numerous works of fiction in Chinese, three of which have previously been translated into English. Her most recent novel, Cocoon, was well-reviewed in the United States, but was published by the small press World Editions. Women, Seated, backed by America’s largest publishing company, is poised to reach a wider audience, and its narrative is more accessible to U.S. readers than Cocoon’s, which explored the fallout from China’s Cultural Revolution. 

The trope of the nanny who feels ambivalent about her role yet cannot help loving her charge is a classic in English-language literature. While this dynamic has historically been racialized in the United States, Zhang’s careful observations of how gender and class disempower her characters is hardly unique to China. Han Zhang, the editor, told me that her goal in selecting books for this series is to reflect contemporary Chinese society—which isn’t so different from the United States. “People don’t need to think of China as some faraway place, all smoke and mirrors,” she said. As she pointed out, the novel is full of scenes that will be familiar to millennial women in America: Yu Ling has to manage the emotions of her overbearing boyfriend, all the while fretting about wedding planning. 

Zhang Yueran, too, was keen to depict contemporary China. As she and her translator, Jeremy Tiang, both pointed out, the novels by older, male authors that, until now, have dominated the Chinese-to-English translation scene, tended to focus on “the history, the trauma of China.” Although Tiang makes an effort to advocate for writers whose work he loves (like Zhang), he told me that he receives more offers to translate work by men than by women, which reflects China’s male-dominated literary scene. “Yueran is carving out space for herself within this environment,” he said. “She’s been making sure that her work does get out of China, and she teaches at an MFA program [at Renmin University in Beijing] where she’s able to redress the balance a little.” 

Zhang said that the gender gap is less noticeable in the current generation of younger authors. In part, this is due to the fact that, as in the United States, it’s hard to make a living from writing. Men, who feel pressure to provide for their families, often lack the flexibility that some women have to freelance. That flexibility, though, can vanish once those women have children, she said: “Some [writers] just disappear.”

In the strange, suspended reality of the otherwise empty household after Qin Wen’s disappearance in Women, Seated, Yu Ling’s bond with Kuan Kuan increasingly feels like one between a real mother and child. When a stranger refers to Kuan Kuan as Yu Ling’s son in public, she is startled, but then lingers on the moment in which she and Kuan Kuan were temporarily seen as “family” by the outside world. Even in this fantasy, Yu Ling tries to remind Kuan Kuan that his house is not actually her home, and that one day she might leave, but he insists she has to stay to look after “the place.” It turns out, though, that he’s not referring to the house itself, but instead the tent he’s built in the living room, a corollary of the life in which Yu Ling serves as his symbolic, if temporary, mother.

Yet Kuan Kuan is also more aware of the tumultuous circumstances of his family life than he lets on. “The boy was very important,” Zhang told me. “He knows a lot, but maybe doesn’t want to express that.” Near the end of the book, Yu Ling realizes, for the first time, that Kuan Kuan “would no longer tell her everything he was thinking.” Perhaps, despite all his imaginary play, he is all too aware that the life he and Yu Ling have constructed is a fantasy, one that will inevitably be punctured at some point in the future, as he grows up and the boundaries of class reassert themselves. For a time, though, the two are allowed to live outside of the world, as a mother and child in feeling if not in name.

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