For today’s Sunday reading I finished off Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. Written in the early 1990s, it’s just a look a hundred or so years into the future. Not cyberpunk or nanotech or space opera. I didn’t think it was all that revolutionary a story, but I’m also reading it 15 years after it was first published.
China Mountain Zhang is an engineering technition living in New York. He passes for Chinese, when China is the dominant force on Earth. He struggles. He watches giant kite races with human riders. He has to take a job on Baffin Island to make ends meet, but eventually gets to study in China. There’s a couple of short chapters from the points of view of other, marginally connected characters: a couple of Martian settlers, a kite flier, and a woman with whom Zhang once went on a couple of dates.
Zhang is gay. Homosexuality isn’t unknown in science fiction, but I think this is the first science fiction story I’ve read where gay life is portrayed a lot like it is in reality today (or was in the 80s). Looked down on, sometimes penalized legally, generally ignored in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of way. The gay men in the story are in the closet. I’m a bit surprised though, since most science fiction authors I’ve read project that either we’ll get more open culturally, or there will be a severe backlash after which deviates will be hunted down (more or less). I generally think we’ll be getting more open, though to the extent that Heinlein promoted free love I think is a long way off. So reading something where the attitude towards gays could be seen today is odd. Not wrong. Just odd.
All of the characters McHugh writes about feel very inadequate. I don’t mean they feel inadequate to me. They are shy, withdrawn, and feel like they don’t measure up. They constantly worry about whether they are liked, or making the right impression. That was off-putting. There wasn’t any confident characters to cleanse the palate, so to speak.
It’s the earliest piece of fiction I’ve read that deals with global warming as a catastrophe to humans. Lots of desertification, but no rising sea levels, so I’m not sure what’s up with it. In fact, most of the technological science fiction in the story is pretty far away from the plot. It isn’t about grand techological or scientific change. The biggest changes are political (the rise of China). But mostly, it’s just a personal story of a gay man.
It was engrossing enough that I didn’t lose interest to go check email or anything like that in the last 100 pages, so it meets my #1 test for literature. I got sucked in to it.
Title: China Mountain Zhang
Author: Maureen F. McHugh
Cover creator: Wayne Barlow (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Tor / Holtzbrinck
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 310 p.
Publication date: January 1993
ISBN-10: 0-812-50892-0
LC classification: PS3563.C3687 C48 1992
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