#sour heart
Jenny Zhang Challenges The Way We Think About The Immigrant Experience
Jenny Zhang believes in wasting time.
Today, In the United States, this nearly amounts to heresy. For all of the wastefulness of the idealized middle-class American lifestyle, to endorse wasting time is to question our centuries-old national reverence for hard work, bootstrapping, what millennials might call “the grind.” Every moment is one in which you could — should! — be launching your own consulting brand or picking up Uber shifts, forging your own path through this late capitalist hellscape.
But for Zhang, a poet, essayist and fiction writer, squandering those moments should be a basic human right.
“I think wasting of time is something that truly every single human should be afforded and should be allowed,” she told me over lunch at an East Village diner. She’s soft-spoken, exuding a calm, understated warmth. “One of the indulgent and also cool aspects of art,” she said, “is that it is wasteful with language and it resists function.”
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