On the first page of The Moon: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog, Yuxin Zhao states her aesthetic outright: she values fragments more than structure, digression more than destination. The book can be read as a compilation of diary entries, scattered tiny life episodes ordered chronologically and grouped by zodiac signs. Together, in the space outlined by ordinary circumstances, records of dreams, and food logs, they trace the metamorphosis of a long-distance relationship between two women, one as an international student in California and the other back home in China. The book’s author is the first woman; whether a fictionized nonfiction writing “I” or a nameless autofiction protagonist is hard to tell. A representative entry goes like this:
12/11 The diary entries span from November 8 to May 18, each varying in length. The years are unspecified, but if the titular “fire rooster” and “earth dog” refer to the Tibetan Rabjung cycle, then late 2017 and early 2018 are the timeframe—the reference to Xi Jiping’s scrapping of presidential term limits in a February entry substantiates this conjecture. Reading these entries, where all sentences start in lowercase and all paragraphs are rendered in a constrained tone, one becomes aware of the reading experience itself and begins wondering where all this is going. There could only be two outcomes of a relationship, so it’s not the destination but the journey that will make the difference. The tedium inherent to diary entries risks boring us, and the rescue comes from the sense of orientation offered by the organizing devices of dates and zodiac signs. Recurring themes and topics, from rockets to time measurement, also render a sense of progression. The abrupt transitions from tiny stories of daily life to a list of food items taken in each diary entry offer a sense of change, a split-second reorientation that serves as transition, time mark, and a tiny chunk of plotline shift at the same time. There is a deadpan matter-of-factness about these moments, the connotation that eating is as normal and integrated into life as the sex the two women often virtually engage in. 飲食男女 (Eat, drink, men, women): the Book of Rites over two thousand years ago already recognized life’s cardinal needs or desires. Constancy and change: isn’t all writing, at an abstract level, about these themes? In addition to small-scale, bottom-up attempts to break monotony, Zhao also deploys top-down strategies like inserting self-contained, vignette-like plays and essays. The first play, “On Orange,” consists of two acts that are themselves split apart between chunks of diary entries. The play is all conversation, starting on the topic of orange as fruit and color but then moving into family history. Given what we already know about the protagonist (or the writer of the diary) by this point, one of the play’s conversants becomes recognizably the diary writer herself. Mid-conversation, we suddenly realize we are now much more familiar with the diary writer, having learned more about her family history and outlook on the world than the diary entries alone revealed. Then, the essay “Little Bee’s Kindergarten” takes on the family history and extends it, blending it with a business plan the protagonist sets to carry out herself. Her family worked as rocket fuel specialists in Maoist China, their sociopolitical status rising and falling with the political whirlwind of the Cultural Revolution. While such fluctuations had not befallen the twentysomething protagonist herself, a family history like that still manifests itself and directs her plan for the future: after graduation from her SoCal school, she dreams of opening a kindergarten right in the Westfield at Santa Clarita, where every kid should design a rocket and launch their design to graduate. The plan is detailed and specific, to the extent that the playing field’s layout and even the positioning of each kid in play are meticulously depicted. Training of the kids’ minds will come through combinatorics: “1. My mother has 1 sibling. / 2. My father has 2 siblings. / 3. The 3 siblings each have a daughter. Together there are 4 daughters. / … If you are to design a rocket, how many cabins does the rocket need and how should the passengers be arranged?” This essay is my favorite. The draw lies not only in its playful imagination, but also in the firmness with which it grounds the protagonist and her future. If I only get a floating sense of her from the diary entries, by now, I already feel close enough to her to see her as coming from a specific place and heading to a particular future. Not every literary experiment could reach its aimed destination, but Yuxin Zhao has at least achieved limning a life on the page through a patchwork of fragments. The Moons: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog, by Yuxin Zhao. New York, New York: Calamari Archive, March 2024. 250 pages. $18.00, paper. Hantian Zhang is a National Book Critics Circle 2023-2024 Emerging Critics Fellow. His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, AGNI, The Offing, and elsewhere. Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
1.dream: massacre in a conference room. 5 almond sea salt crackers.
2.1 small cup of red curry chicken soup. 1 small cup of green iced tea.
3.3 eggs scrambled with 3 pieces of bologna. last night before sleep I realized virtual sex is a symbolic act of putting one’s body on display for another, an act that carries no direct sensory pleasure in itself, but C sees it as a necessary proof of love and an act that has the same function as face-to-face sex. …
Heavy Feather Review 