Companions

Companions is a selection of novellas and short stories by the Zhejiang writer Zhang Ji, published in March 2018 by Citic Press Group · CITIC Dafang. It gathers eight stories written at different stages of his career across roughly a decade. The characters are ordinary men and women from cities and townships: a middle-aged divorcée who makes her living partnering others at card games, a self-isolating woman abandoned as a child, a couple in a small fishing village who lose their daughter, a young man worn down by city life—people stumbling through marriage, family, work and social obligations, pushed forward by life while keeping their secret sorrows to themselves. The title story follows a middle-aged woman who meets a new card partner and is on the verge of starting over when her old partner meets with disaster. Little Jing, which first made Zhang Ji's name, tells of a young man's devotion to his deceased girlfriend and the awkward, restrained interactions among three men. Poon Tai Hoi portrays a woman with an unhappy childhood who, once welcomed back into family warmth, realizes she was only ever needed. The Couple's Shop follows a couple in a small fishing village whose marriage fractures after their daughter's accident; it has been adapted into a film. Zhang Ji writes no spectacle, only the ripples of the everyday world: cramped ways of surviving, emotional entanglements and practical predicaments, peeled back layer by layer in calm, restrained prose that reveals the goodwill and sense of responsibility surviving amid impermanence and displacement. For this he has been called a "storyteller of the mortal world" by his publisher and the media. The collection was selected for the Sina Good Books List in March 2018.