I don’t know anything about Daoism except that Ursula K LeGuin thought it was cool and good.
This is relevant because I just finished China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh, a 1992 alt-history about an American-born Chinese man in a unipolar world where Socialism (with Chinese Characteristics) appears to be hegemonic.
I first heard about the book in one of Zachary Gillian’s bluesky posts and bought it immediately because that man knows ball. It went into my DNF pile after I ran into an uncomfortable amount of slurs in chapter one. Then I heard glowing praise about it several times from Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Viable Paradise, and decided to pick it up again.
Hate when something I want to hate is actually extremely good.
The slurs really weren’t necessary, and it needs a massive trigger warning slapped across one of its chapters, but it is one of the finest books I’ve read in a long time.
In summary, the novel covers ten years of Zhang’s life as he moves between New York, China, and Canada, with occasional diversions into other lives that touch his. McHugh uses these stories of mostly marginalized people to sketch out a world with a wild alt-history, peculiar social norms, and novel technologies. Readers more attuned to actual Chinese culture (or Chinese-American culture) will have more to say about this book than I could (both positive and negative) but as an outsider to both these cultures (USAmerican and Chinese), I was fascinated.
The prose is invisible and the characters are irresistible to follow. Zhang’s miserable lavender date in chapter one alone is well worth the price of the book. Her skill with Man vs The Man plots is staggering, especially how she personifies the wielders and victims of the systems that govern her alt-Earth. It’s very engaging, to the point that I now have opinions (probably wrong ones) about Martian council processes and Daoist engineering principles.
Speaking once again of Daoism, the title of this post is how I understood the book’s interpretation of the Dao, specifically of wu-wei, the Daoist concept of non-doing. As a non-expert, it sounds to me like wu-wei refers to doing without analyzing, allowing experience to lead to outcomes without the mind getting in the way.
It’s an interesting counterpoint to a tendency I see in my own reading nowadays, that of trying to reverse engineer why something works. Trying to work on on my craft has turned me into a “no do only think” nerd when it comes to reading, almost the anti-thesis of the Dao.
Someone recently said to me that a good book teaches you how to read it. If China Mountain Zhang is a book about the Dao, then it certainly taught me how to read it. A few chapters in, I disappeared into McHugh’s world and writing, re-entering the mode of “no think only do” after a very, very long time. Cannot recommend it highly enough.
TLDR: China Mountain Zhang good. Look up trigger warnings. Remember it’s from 1992. Please correct me if you’re culturally Chinese.
Abhijeet Makes Things 