Review: Lucy Zhang
On Hollowed by Lucy Zhang
by Tyler Truman Julian
Lucy Zhang’s debut fiction chapbook, Hollowed, probes the depths of the human experience, zeroing in on the theme of agency. Zhang’s compelling characters, poetic imagery and body horror build a cohesive and disturbing collection of short shorts and flash fiction. Hollowed’s strange but accessible fiction is definitely for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Han Kang.
In “Soft-Shelled Turtle,” a woman reflects on a childhood of eating turtle soup while fairies play mahjong in her kitchen. The fairies want to eat turtle soup and demand it of the woman, who appears more prepared to offer them her firstborn child. But what the fairies know and the reader learns across the story’s two short pages is that this child is purely theoretical, something that may or may not happen one day. The woman’s memories of childhood help paint the picture the fairies see clearly: This woman is not living up to the imposed expectations of her race and gender. In this way, this fairy story, like most fairy tales, has a moral. The fairies still take from the woman, like they do in most fairy tales, and something is sacrificed. Relationships with family are severed by her lack of a marriage and children; a turtle is cooked and eaten.
Through “Soft-Shelled Turtle,” the reader is plunged into the strange, often tragic, sometimes humorous world of Hollowed. In Zhang’s tightly-crafted world (so often mirroring our own, even if the mirror is sometimes a funhouse mirror), women can be disobedient and punished, but independent as in “Soft-Shelled Turtle.” They can be loved (but only when they teach others to love them): “Be soft, like you’re coaxing a sparrow off a bridge rail” (“How to make me orgasm”). They can be broken, as in “The Stone Girl,” a story that solidifies the poetic nature of the chapbook. Not only does Zhang rely on the metaphor of rock to describe the girls of “The Stone Girl,” but each vignette seems closer to a prose poem than a literary sketch. Each word of the story has a purpose, creating meaningful poetic imagery. The stone girl, made of “something else” (the others in the story are made of basalt and travertine), can think and feel, and she is carved into a statue reminiscent of Venus de Milo. And what does she think? “She thinks she has never looked so symmetrical, so delicate, and she wonders if this is what having skin is like. Or maybe this newfound fragility is because she stays awake the entire night. She waits for dawn, for its rays to heat her face” (“The Stone Girl”). When her sculptor awakes, he realizes her face has cracked, whether a flaw in the stone or a product of his carving is never discussed, but “I can work with this, he thinks as he picks up his chisel and attempts to pivot his artistic muse…but when he strikes the mallet onto the end of the chisel, a chunk of her face cracks off, falls to the ground, crumbles to unevenly sized chunks and dust” (“The Stone Girl”).
So much of this collection circles around questions of agency. And, here, in “The Stone Girl,” an extended metaphor for a controlling relationship between a man and a woman, there is no agency, and the statue remains standing, half of her face gone, “staring at him, as though to ask what he’d do next.” The stories in Hollowed continue exploring agency through its interesting women and language, but also by diving deeper into body horror. In “Thigh Gap” a grandmother hands a young woman a knife to “carve out your thighs.” Even after the woman cuts away her flesh, creating a large thigh gap, she realizes she is still the same woman, thigh gap or not. The theme of agency and the conflict between the lack of agency and asserting one’s agency continue even if the horror is more subdued in the chapbook’s story most rooted in realism: “Cracked.” “Cracked” explores pregnancy and the narrator’s preoccupation with death. When she trips and falls, dropping a large watermelon, narrator realizes the watermelon, having been plucked from the vine some time ago, was already dead when she dropped it. She says, “It couldn’t have died twice when it rolled down the stairs and revealed its insides to the world” (“Cracked”). The watermelon becomes a metaphor for the narrator’s pregnancy and the pregnancy is a type of death, a loss of agency. “Code Baby” and “Hatchling” further explore pregnancy and loss, both the mother’s loss and what the loss of a baby can mean. Horror comes both in the body and connections between motherhood and monstrosity. “Code Baby” shows how numbers and code cannot capture the complicated emotions and reality of pregnancy and loss, while “Hatchling” shows the fear attached to pregnancy and childbirth. Both stories lean heavily into metaphor and intentional, figurative language, daring to cultivate poetic moments amid their prose.
The collection closes with “Room Tour” in which a time traveler visits a woman in the present who will one day be his lover. The narrator says, “My lover from the future says I am dead in his time” (“Room Tour”). The narrator refuses to ask her future lover the tough but expected questions (How do I die?); instead, she asks whether or not they are happy together and about love. Rather than answering, he tells her to make her own choices, stay healthy, and live the way she wants to live. When she says she can do that and he acts incredulous, the narrator responds, “I mean, how else am I supposed to live?” (“Room Tour”). This question lingers into the chapbook’s final paragraph in which the narrator muses on why someone would worry about someone else’s future when they should be worried about their own, leaving the reader with the question of how else am I supposed to live? This is the question Zhang seems to want to leave her readers with, and after spending time with nine stories rooted so deeply in the theme of agency, what else is the reader supposed to take away? Without self-determination, without a sense of agency, the reader will be hollowed, much like Zhang’s characters.