The Chinese novelist Zhang Yueran has repeatedly returned to one question in her fiction: How do women relate to each other? Many of her works feature two women in relationships that mix intimacy and malice, loyalty and resentment. Her debut novel, The Distance of Cherries (2004), is a coming-of-age story featuring two childhood friends who can physically feel each other’s pain, an uncanny bond that entangles the pair for the duration of their lives. The title story of her short story collection Older Qiao, Younger Qiao (2017) depicts a pair of sisters born under China’s one-child policy, the consequences of which distort their family dynamics and push them onto drastically different paths in life. Sometimes friends, sometimes sisters, sometimes roommates, sometimes romantic rivals—the women Zhang writes about antagonize each other yet also look to each other as mirrors that enable them to recognize something deeper in themselves. But what happens when the conflicts are not just a pendulum of interpersonal rights and wrongs or the consequence of historical contingency? More bluntly, what happens when the conflict is class?

The protagonist of Zhang’s Women, Seated, recently translated by Jeremy Tiang, is Yu Ling, the live-in nanny of a powerful Chinese family. Yu Ling had never intended to become a nanny, but it was the career path that fate had seemingly laid out for her. Her previous job was with a couple who owned an interior-design firm; there, she began taking on some administrative tasks when her regular nanny duties were light. She harbored dreams that this would lead to an office job—she could be a designer’s assistant, a regular employee. But that dream ended abruptly when Qin Wen, the daughter of a high-ranking Communist Party official, requested—perhaps insisted—that Yu Ling come to work for her instead. 

On the surface, the two have an agreeable, even friendly relationship. But Yu Ling is under no illusion that Qin Wen sees her as an equal—there is a subtle contempt that niceties barely conceal. Yu Ling notes, for example, that though she keeps Qin Wen company while she paints, when Qin Wen talks to others, she describes these sessions as “long periods of solitude.” And when Qin Wen asks Yu Ling to sit for a portrait, she portrays her as “uglier than she was,” with a “sluggish blankness” and eyeballs that look like “buttons fastened in their sockets, completely immobile.” This casual disregard extends to Yu Ling’s personal boundaries: Her time and labor are demanded no matter the time of day, and she is subjected to Qin Wen’s emotional volatility, which escalates as Kuan Kuan, Qin Wen’s son, begins to favor her. Their struggle comes to a head when Qin Wen’s father is arrested for corruption and the family’s influence and power evaporate overnight. Now disgraced, Qin Wen finds herself at the mercy of those she once paid to serve her. 

The social dynamics depicted in Women, Seated serve to illuminate the broader material realities of domestic work. Zhang seems to be responding to the current social crisis in the global care economy, as domestic workers around the world—whose private employment often renders them more vulnerable to exploitation—lobby for expansions of legal workplace protections, livable wages, and safer working conditions. It is tempting to situate Women, Seated in the tradition of socialist realist fiction—its critique of class politics, its working-class narrator—but there is no revolutionary romanticism in Zhang’s work. For Yu Ling, the chips have fallen where they may, but life continues. In its examination of class in China, what feels truer to life in Zhang’s fiction is precisely its refusal of an easy resolution. 

Born in Jinan in 1982, Zhang is often referred to as a “New Concept” writer—a label attached to those who participated in the New Concept Writing Contest, an influential national youth competition. Organized by several prominent Chinese universities and the Shanghai-based youth literary magazine Mengya, the competition was started in 1999 to push back against the formulaic and prescriptive mode of writing instruction commonly used in Chinese schools. Within its first decade of operation, the contest had become a commercialized route to literary success and had catapulted a cohort of young writers to national fame. Zhang won the competition’s third iteration in 2001, and with a steady output of novels and short stories to her credit since then, she has built herself up to be one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Chinese fiction. 

Although the competition is still held annually, most of the prominent New Concept authors were part of the “post-’80s writers,” a generation that was born in the Deng Xiaoping era of market reform. Writing at the turn of the 21st century, they were part of a changing literary scene in which their fiction was increasingly concerned with a modernizing urban milieu. These writers explored what it meant to come of age at that particular juncture of Chinese history, and all the growing pains that went with it. The writer Han Han became a near-international phenomenon in the early 2000s with the publication of his debut work, Triple Door, a novel that railed against the standardized-testing-dominated education system in China. And most of Zhang’s earliest work featured teenage or young adult women navigating family relations, body-image issues, and personal relationships. In the early days of post-’80s writing, critics drew attention to the frivolity, melodrama, and overcommercialization of these works, as the constant media attention led to an abundance of publishing deals and a torrent of quickly produced titles.  

One wonders if these critiques early in her career drove Zhang deeper into social realism in her later fiction. In Home, she wrote about the 2008 Great Wenchuan Earthquake, one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern Chinese history. Cocoon, her widely translated, award-winning novel from 2017, is about the long shadow of the Cultural Revolution and how its impact continues to reverberate on an intimate, multigenerational scale. Women, Seated is perhaps her most pointed work of fiction to date—a novel about class and politics in contemporary China, which has seen a decade-long anti-corruption campaign led by Xi Jinping. 

Women, Seated is a meticulously constructed novel—with a mystery doled out in measured bits and plot twists foreshadowed in layers—but what propels it is the societal tension that it tries to make legible. The arrest of Qin Wen’s father is the story’s inciting incident, but Zhang does not dwell on the inner workings of political graft—instead, the existence of corruption is treated as something natural, almost unworthy of note. “That’s just what government officials do, isn’t it? Why else would anyone want those jobs?” her protagonist notes dully, almost cavalierly. 

This political situation is merely the background to a different story of power ascendant—one that takes place in the domestic sphere, which for Zhang has long been the arena where broader social forces are most visually expressed and intimately felt. This is especially true for the household itself, a “workspace” without formal titles or organizational charts yet dense with unspoken hierarchies. The relationships among the domestic staff, who might otherwise find solidarity with one another, are strained and shaped by each one’s perceived proximity to the “sir” and the “ma’am.” 

As a physical setting, the house also materializes class distinctions in the way that the characters navigate and relate to the space—its layout, furnishings, and ornate decor. We are constantly reminded of the family’s status through interior items: an antique Tibetan carpet, an Alice Neel painting, pine trees in the garden that once grew by the entrance to a Kyoto temple. Yu Ling describes the joy and peace she has gained from baking in the state-of-the-art kitchen, likening it to the way her lover, a chauffeur for a similarly wealthy family, became almost “lovesick” over the BMW Series 7 he drove. “They have no idea,” she observes, “that the miracle of these machines isn’t that the food they produce is more delicious…but the joy they provide to the people operating them.” The rich acquire these items as status symbols, but it is the members of their domestic staff who use their belongings daily, care for their pets, and rear their children. At some point in the book, Qin Wen remarks: “A nanny has to build her life within someone else’s, like a painting within a painting. Have you ever looked closely at one of those? You’d be surprised how crudely drawn they are, like undeveloped organs.”