Journey to the Heartland thoughtfully merges the Chinese immigrant experience with the struggle to accept one’s sexual identity and find belonging.
“‘Mom, if the Earth is round, what about the people in the southern hemisphere? How could they not fall off the Earth?’”
Hanwei Zhou grows up in a Chinese factory town during the industrial boom of the 1980s. Western culture and urban life have begun to flourish, and Hanwei finds himself living in relative comfort, surrounded by peers. Yet his childhood is haunted by the darkness of his father, Gaoming.
Much of the first half of the book unpacks the fraught reality of living with a father who is physically, sexually, and psychologically abusive, who brings younger men into the family home and allows them to prey on Hanwei. An ever inquisitive child, Hanwei attempts to understand the realities undergirding his father’s behavior—the pain of suppressing homosexuality at a time when it was criminalized—but ultimately sees them tear his family apart.
These scars follow Hanwei as he excels academically, wins regional competitions, and eventually leaves for Beijing and then Los Angeles. After his arrival in LA, the novel broadens to show Hanwei realizing he can embrace his own long closeted sexuality, engage in progressive causes he believes in, and form relationships across racial and cultural lines.
“While his mind was racing, Hanwei further realized that his earlier suspicion that all men were secretly attracted to men and the opposite assumption others seemed to have had that all men were attracted only to women were both flawed.”
There is a deep core of sincerity and warmth at the center of Journey to the Heartland. It approaches characters with a generosity that doesn’t brush over faults, struggles, and misunderstandings. Shameful and difficult to articulate emotions that often get pushed under the rug are given space, as when Hanwei experiences a sense of inferiority and embarrassment while dating people from different cultures.
Similarly, the book makes room for the perspective of people like Hanwei’s mother, Rulan, who struggle to overcome ingrained cultural biases and bigotry. These are delicate emotions to articulate, yet the book consistently finds a balance between the good-faith innocence of people with differing backgrounds and points of view and the malicious racisms and discriminations that can often be lumped together.
“For a woman born around the same year of the founding of the new China, who worked honestly in a pharmacy for once as little as ten U.S. dollars a month, a Starbucks drink was neither a craving nor a necessity. “‘I will only drink a little. You can help with the rest.’”
In one memorable moment, Hanwei finds himself trying to persuade a Trump voter to switch their allegiance to Bernie Sanders. Staging such encounters as conversations rather than violent battles demonstrates the book’s consistent effort to show the capacity for people to accept one another.
At the same time, dialogue can sometimes feel flat and expositional, lacking the unique tones and mannerisms of organic speech. Some ideas, like Hanwei’s plan to get a PhD, can feel like they’re included more to evoke a point rather than capture character thoughts and realities. That quality carries beyond the dialogue and can be seen in some cliched and familiar phrasings as well.
The turn to contemporary politics in later sections—touching on everything from Donald Trump and Black Lives Matter to Proposition 8 in California—creates an intriguing verisimilitude with the world around us. However, some political discussions, reflections on social issues, and different characters’ perspectives are expounded in broad statements and monologues, following familiar dogmatic and partisan lines rather than emerging naturally from the complex lives of the novel’s characters.
A heartfelt novel about immigrant and queer coming-of-age, Journey to the Heartland traces a Chinese-American finding himself, his place, and his community.
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