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What the Zhang Boys Know

by Clifford Garstang (Goodreads Author)

4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 · rating details · 38 ratings · 21 reviews

"What the Zhang Boys Know has a dozen chapters, each one a vivid short story in itself. Garstang makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The lives of the inhabitants of a condominium in Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown are told separately and as part of a web of entanglements. The entrances and exits are handled with the deftness of a French comedy, but the empathy...more

Paperback, 218 pages

Published October 1st 2012 by Press 53

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Oct 31, 2012 Shirley rated it 3 of 5 stars

Each chapter comprising What the Zhang Boys Know belongs to a different resident in a condo complex, which is a unique method of story-telling. The characters' lives intertwine to an extent, making the sum of the short stories into a short novel. All the residents are neighbours of Zhang Feng-qi, a recent widower raising two young sons and in search of a mother for his children. As the individuals' stories reveal their lives, trials and loves; we learn that the young Zhang boys know a lot more t...more

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Oct 28, 2012 Tricia Dower rated it 4 of 5 stars

An intelligent and compelling collection of original stories about characters who live in a condo building called Nanking Mansion and appear in each other’s stories. My favorites are the poignant six in which Feng-qi Zhang, his motherless sons, his father and his girlfriend appear. The collection is book-ended by two of these stories, giving the collection the feel of a novel brought to a satisfying conclusion, in this case a story of love lost, love found and love lost again. The last story, “T...more

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Oct 08, 2012 Eric Wyatt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Good fiction transports us into other worlds. Sometimes, this takes the form of the sweeping Civil War epic or the Deep Space Trilogy--big, complex novels filled with a large cast of main characters and more extras than could be supplied by a Hollywood casting company.

While Clifford Garstang's new book, What the Zhang Boys Know, is less assuming in scope, it nevertheless settles us into an unknown world both captivating and complex in its own way. The setting for The Zhang Boys isn't necessarily...more

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Nov 11, 2012 Patty rated it 3 of 5 stars

I am generally not a fan of short stories; they are all literary and float somewhere way above my head mocking me with my inability to understand them. Rife with deep hidden meanings that my very literal thought processes will never manage to uncover. If I had read any one of the stories included in What the Zhang Boys Know I would still feel that way, but taken together they help to explain each other a bit. I can't say I completely understand all the nuances but I am at least not completely lo...more

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Nov 07, 2012 Laura de Leon rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-stories, review-copy

3.5 stars

What the Zhang Boys know was an uneven collection of short stories, with a very definite voice that bound them even tighter than the shared location.

The stories I enjoyed most were the ones that directly involved the Zhang Boys. I found that the author's style worked very well for me with these, and I was able to identify with the characters fast enough to be invested, even in the small space of an individual story.

I wish that the story "What the Zhang Boys Know about Life on the Planet...more 3.5 stars

What the Zhang Boys know was an uneven collection of short stories, with a very definite voice that bound them even tighter than the shared location.

The stories I enjoyed most were the ones that directly involved the Zhang Boys. I found that the author's style worked very well for me with these, and I was able to identify with the characters fast enough to be invested, even in the small space of an individual story.

I wish that the story "What the Zhang Boys Know about Life on the Planet Earth" had ended the book. I loved how it tied into the other stories that preceded it with a very different viewpoint.

The story that did end the book did a better job of wrapping up the life of the Zhangs, but didn't tie up the entire book in the same way. What I liked best about the book as a whole was the way the the stories interwove.

Unfortunately, when it came to the stories that weren't about the Zhang boys, I didn't connect with the characters, and I didn't think the distinctive voice added to the stories. These generally looked at the characters at low point in their lives, when they were in the midst of making bad decisions, and it was difficult to care in the time I spent with each one. The couple with a relationship with hints of 50 Shades of Gray, the gay couple with a missing dog, that couldn't connect with each other, the novelist and the sculptor that got to know their neighbors very well... I just didn't relate.

I also didn't get a sense of the Chinatown setting for the building. The building itself had such promise (why did it have a gallery of artwork, anyway?), but I never had a sense of it either. The book was a collection of portraits of the characters, with a blurred background behind them, just enough detail to cause me to wonder.

It is possible that I'm missing some of the point of this-- I often have trouble with Literary Writing by male authors.

The plots are interesting, and might work better for someone else. Certainly, I'm happy I got to know the Zhang Boys and their immediate family, and perhaps you'll see more reward in the others as well.

(less)

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Nov 07, 2012 Becky rated it 3 of 5 stars

The building is known as the Nanking Mansion. Home to twelve condos and an assortment of characters, it serves as the connecting web between the short stories in Clifford Garstang's What the Zhang Boys Know.

First we meet Zhang Feng-qi and his sons, Simon and Wesley. Feng-qi has recently lost his wife to a tragic car accident. He's struggling in his new role as a single father and hopes that he'll soon find a woman who can help fill the hole his wife left in her death. He's also just recently bro...more

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Oct 08, 2012 Suzanne rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Set in modern day Washington DC, What the Zhang Boys Know is a collection of short stories, connected by common threads: the characters all live in the same building of condominiums in a run-down (but up and coming) section of Chinatown, they are lonely, and have suffered loss and disappointment. The Zhang boys are the young children of Fenq-qi Zhang, a widower whose life is turned upside down when his wife is killed in a motor-vehicle accident. While the boys do not know everything that is reve...more Set in modern day Washington DC, What the Zhang Boys Know is a collection of short stories, connected by common threads: the characters all live in the same building of condominiums in a run-down (but up and coming) section of Chinatown, they are lonely, and have suffered loss and disappointment. The Zhang boys are the young children of Fenq-qi Zhang, a widower whose life is turned upside down when his wife is killed in a motor-vehicle accident. While the boys do not know everything that is revealed to the reader, the title is indicative of the special vantage point we are to receive. We will be let on to something that everyone else doesn't see.

Here's what I liked about this book: The idea connecting the different lives through separate stories is wonderful. It affords the reader the opportunity to witness the lives and actions of the many characters sometimes in their own words, and sometimes narrated by the author himself. Clifford Garstang presents a novel that is eloquent and vivid in imagery. The prose is outstanding. Here's an example when Fenq-qi travels to China to escort his father home:

"Gone were the dark gray streets filled with sturdy, bell-ringing bicycles, replaced by broad-avenues and honking cars; gone, too, were the fierce political billboards, overtaken by neon Coca-Cola signs and Golden Arches."

Here is what disappointed me about this book: I am no prude, but the characters represented are dark, edgy and frankly, disturbing. We are given a view of these people, but we are not allowed to warm to them. For instance - the character Aloysius acts in ways that can infer kindness, but we don't know why he helps people. Does he feel compassion? Is he attracted to these people? Does it give him a sense of belonging? We'll never know because Aloysius, like the other characters, don't really permit us to witness any depth of emotion. Because of this, they remain distant and the reader is only engaged in a very limited way.

I also found the different perspectives weren't different enough. When a book is narrated by several characters, I would expect the language to differ quite a bit between narratives. This was not the case. If the character development had extended to the language of the storytellers, in addition to adding emotion and personal observation of the people they interact with, I would have been more drawn to these characters. In actuality, I was repelled by them. This is too bad, because it could have been an uplifting tale of humans finding comfort and solace in each other.(less)

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Dec 07, 2012 Jodi rated it 5 of 5 stars

I didn't know what to expect when the book's editor and publisher suggested Zhang Boys to me. All I knew is that Garstang was editor of Prime Numbers and that I have NEVER been disappointed in any Press 53 issue.

This book is superbly written! I had mistakenly believed that writing a novel in short-story chapters and allowing various points of view to dictate, depending on the character(s), was too difficult to pull off -- well.

Garstang is such a master at this type of structure, there is no co...more

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Sep 04, 2012 Betsy Ashton rated it 4 of 5 stars

If you are looking for a different experience in fiction, I invite you to read What the Zhang Boys Know, a novel in stories by Clifford Garstang. Twelve interlocking stories, each one capable of standing alone, weave a story about a disparate group of characters who inhabit Nanking Mansion, a semi-gentrified building in a marginal area of Washington, D.C.

We first meet Zhang Feng-qi, widowed father of two boys under six in "Nanking Mansion." Faced with losing his boys to his pushy mother-in-law w...more

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Oct 14, 2012 Trish rated it 3 of 5 stars

What the Zhang Boys Know: A Novel in Stories by Clifford Garstang is a book of interconnected short stories which gives us a glimpse into the lives of several neighbors in a Washington DC condominium building.

In the first story, Nanking Mansion, we meet the Zhang family, which consists of the father Feng-qi, his two sons, Simon and Wesley, and Feng-qi’s father, who has recently come from China to live with them. Feng-qi’s wife has died several months before, although the boys still do not fully...more What the Zhang Boys Know: A Novel in Stories by Clifford Garstang is a book of interconnected short stories which gives us a glimpse into the lives of several neighbors in a Washington DC condominium building.

In the first story, Nanking Mansion, we meet the Zhang family, which consists of the father Feng-qi, his two sons, Simon and Wesley, and Feng-qi’s father, who has recently come from China to live with them. Feng-qi’s wife has died several months before, although the boys still do not fully believe she is not coming back. As Feng-qi waits for the arrival of his first date since becoming a widower, he is surprised by a sudden visit from his mother-in-law. This is the day, he reflects later, on which he realizes that “no matter how much he planned, no matter how settled he thought he was, his life was an ocean of change over which he had no control.”

This sentiment holds true for all of the inhabitants of Nanking Mansion, as we see in the increasingly gritty stories that follow. Although some of them were a bit dark for my taste, I did like how they were connected, not only by the appearance of the Zhang boys somewhere in each one, but also by the way the different tenants lives intersected and overlapped in various ways.

The saddest and yet most hopeful moment for me was when the older Zhang boy, Simon, finally accepts that his mother is gone in the story What the Zhang Boys Know About Life on Planet Earth:

"More than ever, he wishes Mama were here, to take him home to Nanking Mansion, to cook dinner for their family, to tell him stories, to bring him pudding in bed and talk to him about all the things he doesn’t understand. But she isn’t there, and for the first time since the accident he thinks maybe she isn’t coming back. Maybe, just maybe, he and Wesley are going to have to find their own way, without their mother, across all the streets and rivers and deserts in the world."

Sad because, of course, no boy should grow up without his mother, but hopeful because we see a glimmer of possibility that he won’t end up lost and aimless as many of his neighbors have.(less)

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Jan 07, 2013 Athira (Reading on a Rainy Day) rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: personal-library, 2012, cat-stories-or-essays, f-literary, fiction, format-tree, source-review

Having recently lost his wife in a horrible accident, Zhang Feng-qi tries to bring up his sons as best as he can, but he is not his wife - he cannot maintain his condo as well as his wife did, nor can he properly answer his two sons, Simon and Wesley, when they insist that their mother will come back. He wonders if his new girlfriend can step in, but knows it is too early to introduce her to the family. He asks his American mother-in-law to help, but she was never supportive of her daughter's ma...more Having recently lost his wife in a horrible accident, Zhang Feng-qi tries to bring up his sons as best as he can, but he is not his wife - he cannot maintain his condo as well as his wife did, nor can he properly answer his two sons, Simon and Wesley, when they insist that their mother will come back. He wonders if his new girlfriend can step in, but knows it is too early to introduce her to the family. He asks his American mother-in-law to help, but she was never supportive of her daughter's marriage so her response isn't that forthcoming. Eventually, he asks his father for help. While the Zhang household is dealing with its own situation, their neighbors are having their own problems - a painter mourns the absence of his love lives and the non-popularity of his paintings, a sculptor isn't sure what to do with the knowledge that he has a son by one of his muses, an insecure woman grapples with her distaste of her long-time boyfriend and his abusive bedroom games.

What the Zhang Boys Know is my favorite kind of book - multiple interlinked narrators, who all talk of their lives and problems and occasionally share opinions on other characters. What I love of this book is how very "I" and "me" each story tends to be, while the protagonist of that story makes other characters feel one-dimensional. And in the next story, one of those one-dimensional characters is now the protagonist - suddenly the reader gets this whole bedroom closet view of a new character and learn things you never guessed about that character. I find these kind of books to be the most realistic among fictional works. The narrators aren't bogged with the same plot, so there is no feeling of too many characters. They all have their troubles, desires, losses and achievements - no one is a pawn to move another person's story forward, which is how real life is.

The one thing that ties all these people together is that they all stay in the same building called the Nanking Mansion. Nobody likes their digs or their neighborhood. The alleys are trashy and the streets dangerous. Almost everyone in the building has financial troubles. They all, however, know each other, and sometimes help each other out when needed. But mostly, they deal with their problems on their own.

With 11 different narrators, there are as many different voices and obsessions in the book. Some are insecure, some depressed, one arrogant and proud, and another one innocent. Among all these narrators with their myriad problems, the Zhang boys appear everywhere. They see more than anyone gives them credit, and it's fascinating reading the same incident from the two perspectives. At the same time, even when they are not accepting enough of their father's new girlfriend, they aren't being unreasonable, they are simply afraid that their mother will never come back if there's another woman in the house.

Some stories were clearly more enjoyable than others; some narrators more understandable than others. There is a woman, Claudia, who loses her husband and her job at the same time, and what follows is many long months of trying, at first, to find a respectable job, and later on, any kind of job. A sister helps her a bit but eventually accuses her of being too irresponsible. Even though the sister is right, and anyone would do exactly what the sister did, it is hard to not empathize with Claudia, after spending pages with her, and seeing how much she really is trying and just how close she is to even contemplating suicide.

What the Zhang Boys Know is a wonderful short story collection, although it's more than just a short story collection. The characters are connected enough for one to feel a sense of continuity and familiarity. The prose is very quick-paced and highly readable and I could probably have finished the book in a day, but there was a sense of comfort in reading just a story or two a day and then subconsciously pondering about them. The writing was also very beautiful, and the different voices across the stories didn't jar my concentration but instead felt sufficiently seamless and distinct. This one is definitely one of my favorite short story collections.(less)

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Dec 15, 2012 Carol rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, asian-literature

What the Zhang Boys Know by Clifford Garstang is a collection of interconnected stories set in the Nanking Mansion. The Mansion was redone into twelve condos.

The residents of the condos were all unique but I felt most comfortable with the Zhang Feng family. The core characters were widowed Zhang Feng, his father from Shanghai and his two boys, Wesley and Simon.

I loved the little boys and their child like thinking. The boys burst into the lives of the inhabitants and often leave a trail of delig...more

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Dec 21, 2012 Jana rated it 5 of 5 stars

I ordered my first copy when the book was released. I was well into the book, when some do-gooder in the house (the same one who disappears the matching sock from each pair I own) hid the book. I searched everywhere. Here I'd been given free access to the quirky lives of a group of neighbors in Nanking Mansions. I was their confidante. I wanted to hear more. So, when I couldn't locate the book, I downloaded another copy on Kindle. I got so involved reading (or rather, being confidante) that I wa...more

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Aug 28, 2012 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars

Nanking Mansion is a sprawling subdivided house located in an (almost gentrified) area of Washington DC and populated by a host of fascinating multicultural characters whose lives intersect by virtue of their shared space. WHAT THE ZHANG BOYS KNOW gives us a glimpse into these lives, each one more enticing than the last, as the stories accumulate to tell an intricate and multilayered tale of love and loss and the lingering effects of both. The enticing narrative pull of these stories left me fee...more

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Oct 17, 2012 Jonathan Rintels rated it 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. The engaging stories of the eclectic condo owners in the "Nanking Mansion" in DC's Chinatown are woven together masterfully. The characters are sharply observed. The details are delicious. This is a work of art created by an author who clearly knows his craft. Read this book and pass it on. Be a part of the broad readership that it deserves.

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Oct 08, 2012 Harvee rated it 5 of 5 stars

These are moving stories of lives accidentally touching through close proximity in the condominium of a busy cosmopolitan city. I found it excellent writing and story telling, realistic, with a framework that is perfect for these stories of urban life.

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Apr 09, 2013 Sharon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: pacific-u-mfa

A microcosm in a book, linked stories that add up to the effect of a novel, the same way Elizabeth Strout manages it in Olive Kitteridge, which is high praise from me (since that is one of my favorites.)

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Nov 17, 2012 Karen Carlson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

Very nice; variety of voice, style, characters in service of a cohesive narrative of loss and chaos. Detailed comments (with possible spoilers) posted on A Just Recompense.

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Feb 22, 2013 Michelle rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013

Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different resident of a small condo complex. Interesting concept, and it works fairly well. I preferred some chapters to others, which may have been a function of the writing or the characters, I'm not quite sure which. My favorite chapter was "What the Zhang Boys Know About Life on the Plant Earth," which also would have made a nice ending.

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Mar 20, 2013 Wayne rated it 5 of 5 stars

Busy, busy. Got to 37% today.

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Dec 23, 2012 Natalie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Check out SummerBooks for a complete and thorough discussion of What the Zhang Boys Know (complete with fancy drink recommendation). :-)

www.summerbooks.podbean.com

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Apr 30, 2013 Hina J rated it 4 of 5 stars

Interesting approach...enjoyed reading a story from so many perspectives...really enjoyed it!

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About Clifford Garstang

Clifford Garstang grew up in the Midwest and received a BA from Northwestern University. After serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Korea, he earned an MA in English and a JD, both from Indiana University, and practiced international law in Singapore, Chicago, and Los Angeles with one of the largest law firms in the United States. Subsequently, he earned an MPA in International Development...more

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