Between Mermaids

Between Mermaids is a short story collection by Zhang Tianyi following Like Snow, Like Mountains. It contains seven works—The Statue, The Red-Hooded Granny, Between Mermaids, Cinderella's Dance, Twelve Changing Mothers, Prometheus and the Eagle, and The BeanStalk—along with an afterword. The collection takes fairy-tale deconstruction as its basic method, drawing on familiar fairy tales and myths such as The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack and the Beanstalk, and filling those ancient skeletons with modern emotional experience, marital and family relationships, and existential predicaments, rewriting them into a world that is both like and unlike a fairy tale. In these stories, the princess is no longer merely a weak figure waiting to be rescued but a warrior with clenched fists; the prince is no longer a hero who inevitably brings happiness but an ordinary person equally confused and hesitant; animals, statues, and even the suffering figures of myth are endowed with emotion and subjectivity. Zhang Tianyi's language is ornate, expansive, and agile, often flashing wit and humor in unexpected places, juxtaposing light fantasy with heavy reality: the blindness and cost of love, the encroachment of motherhood on women's selves, the beautified disappointment of marriage, and the hidden corners of the body and desire. The between in the title refers both to the space between the real and the illusory and to the space between song and tears, love and pain—here fairy tales are not a sweet dream of escaping reality but a magic mirror that reveals the truth of human nature.