Hello, Kitty; Goodbye, Illusions

Minjie Chen takes a journey through China’s shadowlands in “Hello, Kitty and Other Stories” by Anne Stevenson-Yang.

By Minjie ChenNovember 10, 2025

• Fiction

• Cultural Studies

“LIFE IS A MAGNIFICENT robe, riddled with fleas.”

This famous line by Zhang Ailing (1920–95), which concludes the great cosmopolitan Chinese author’s early essay “Dream of Genius,” popped into my mind while reading Anne Stevenson-Yang’s new collection, Hello, Kitty and Other Stories. Writing at the dreamy age of 19, Zhang lamented the “small, gnawing vexations” she could not escape, which marred the otherwise sensuous and splendid life she thoroughly enjoyed. Applied to this new context, the catchy line aptly summarizes what the 10 short stories in Anne Stevenson-Yang’s first foray into fiction reveal about post-1990s Chinese society. Beneath the facade of economic prosperity, a booming real estate market (until the bubble busted, that is), the formation of an urban middle class, and the meteoric rise of the über-rich, or—on a more intimate scale—a picture-perfect family, Stevenson-Yang narrates, in a detached tone, dark tales of fissure and falsehood, cruelty and crime, alienation and apathy.

This collection, a companion book of sorts to the author’s nonfiction book Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy (which was reviewed for LARB last year upon publication), is made up of tales that each stand on their own. Some are, though, loosely connected, sharing overlapping characters and occasionally dropping a small puzzle piece here which you realize fits an inconspicuous corner there. An aloof but seemingly sensible daughter in one story takes her mother’s money unapologetically. In another entry, we learn more about the financial situation of the company owned by her husband. An illegitimate and ungrateful son in one appears to be the same minion ordered around by a teenage hooligan leader in another. In quite a few entries, China’s economic policy plays such a visible role in triggering people’s actions and shaping the course of their lives that it is almost a nonhuman character.

In “The Divorce,” we meet the acerbic and unpleasant Bai Run, who, equipped with a shrewd business sense, orchestrates a divorce from her husband of 41 years in order to game the system and become eligible to purchase a lucrative investment property in suburban Beijing. The divorce is intended to be on paper only, as the couple assures their adult daughter, who, with a history of estrangement from her mother, chooses not to have children and is taking classes in psychology. Their plan (or at least Bai Run’s) is to get remarried once the purchase is complete, but events take an unexpected turn.

A prevalent motif among multiple entries in this compilation—which, like Wild Ride, draws from Stevenson-Yang’s deep feel for a changing China that she acquired from living in the country during the final years of the last century and the first years of this one—is the presence of strong female characters who are capable of harm and evil. Just as Bai Run routinely assaults people in her orbit with biting words, so we meet, in “Fire,” another female protagonist who schemes and, in this case, carries out deadly violence. Phoebe and Guowei, a married couple, operate a thriving hog-slaughtering and meat-processing business against the backdrop of China’s elevating living standards and exploding appetite for pork. Both are from the same small town, but the cosmopolitan wife chooses to go by an English name. She is among the early generation of international students whose graduate education in the United States was made possible only through scholarships (unlike her children’s generation, forced to pay full tuition, which has become a significant source of revenue for American higher education)—whereas the down-to-earth and personable husband has a common Chinese name often chosen by less-educated parents. The power couple ascends to the ranks of the nouveau riche, acquiring real estate in Beijing and New York City, giving their only daughter an elite education. However, as their material wealth stretches across cities and the Pacific Ocean, the small family of three becomes physically scattered and emotionally distanced, until a belated revelation, exposed by a glaring discrepancy in the company’s accounting, snaps a bored Phoebe to violent action.

Bai Song and Li Li, a retired couple, are the main characters of the next two entries. In “Want Want,” they are actors in commercials whose appearance epitomizes elders having led a harmonious life and aged admirably well. Off camera, they carefully safeguard their peaceful life, which is threatened when an old neighbor, formerly part of a state-owned railway construction company sent to Kenya and thus conveniently absent for two decades, returns and risks unearthing a somewhat seedy secret.

In “Hello, Kitty,” the title story of the collection, we follow Bai and Li as they move into an apartment luxuriously furnished by their son—though it is located in a sparsely populated, underdeveloped district on the remote outskirts of Beijing. Their neighboring unit has been designated by the local government as a dormitory for junior high students from a nearby village. Things take an eerily horrific turn. What begins as a neighborly greeting escalates into a robbery and assault perpetrated by the callous adolescents. The author makes explicit the parallel between this modern-day crime and the lawless chaos wrought by Red Guards, who, armed with political righteousness, unleashed youthful rebelliousness through violence endorsed by Chairman Mao. In one scene, Kitty, the title character and the ringleader of the group, discovers an old diary belonging to Bai and taunts him about his professed worship of Mao.

The subject of reckless, plotting, and treacherous female characters continues across several more entries. In one, an adolescent girl from an ultrarich family of real estate developers likes to play with fire; elsewhere, a live-in helper from the hopelessly poor countryside gambles for a better future with all she has: her fertile body, daredevil spirit, and chilling practicality. The uncommon combination of women and darkness almost overshadows the intriguing roles and dramas found in other stories—such as one featuring a so-called “China hand” in search of authenticity and meaning among the locals, or another that reenacts the Count of Monte Cristo’s grim escape, albeit adapted with elements like a sedan, DNA testing, and a Chinese-flavored collusion between the government and the Mafia.

Stevenson-Yang’s writing can be complex, nuanced, and unsettling. After mourning the murder of their disabled son in one story, for example, the surviving family members, freed from the all-consuming burden of caregiving, seem to find time and energy for enjoyable conversation for the first time. In a similarly off-putting detail, when Kitty casually issues orders to her henchmen, she is simultaneously cooking at the stove of the old couple her group has attacked. A wife or husband may be toxic, unfaithful, resentful, or even murderous, yet they always dutifully care for their spouse when the latter is in their sickbed.

The biggest puzzle I was left with after finishing the collection is that, despite the author’s detailed descriptions of events, the protagonists’ inner lives remained opaque to me. They fall into easily recognizable types—the privileged wife who seeks revenge, the desperate rural girl who needs a way out, the spoiled teenager who takes everything for granted and does not care a damn, the obnoxious woman perpetually on the offensive—yet we are not privy to their thoughts, not invited to comprehend or relate to their feelings. Is Bai Run’s acid tongue an innate trait, the product of her upbringing, or a response to her life circumstances? Does Phoebe experience a moment of qualm as she gives in to her vengeful impulse? The cunning live-in housemaid rarely lets on any vulnerable feelings—the closest resemblance I can think of is to those tenacious cartoon villains who always return in the next episode with gusto.

As I pondered the audacious yet unapproachable protagonists, I was reminded of Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants (2009), a macabre novel set in a small Chinese town during the politically ambivalent moment of early 1979—sandwiched between the end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s economic and political reforms. For a book permeated with vicious hostility, unspeakable cruelty, and state-administered brutality, Li’s novel still manages to offer us glimpses—however fleeting—into even the most minor characters participating in evil. These insights do not serve to condone their actions but to humanize them, even as we struggle to accept how our species, when exposed to the right stimuli and conditions, could continually test the limits of our imagination when it comes to humans’ capacity for malevolence. (In a brief scene that stayed with me for years after reading Li’s novel, an unnamed doctor who performed a gruesome procedure in an illegal organ transplant lies awake at night, finding reconciliation only after weighing the attractive future his service has secured for his innocent wife and beautiful children.)

I found a clue to explain my differing reactions to the two books in Li’s afterword, “Other People’s Stories,” where she shares that the inspiration for The Vagrants came from the many court execution announcements posted in her neighborhood when she was a child. The announcements offered narratives of the crimes in tantalizing detail, but Li found them unsatisfying. As a writer, she chose to reimagine the lives and stories left out of those death announcements. Li’s bewitching imagination is so convincing that reading The Vagrants can feel like watching a gripping documentary—one that not only captures people’s actions in real time but also, no doubt guided by an unobtrusive director or a disarming interviewer, coaxes them into disclosing what is going through their minds, whether sublime or ugly, emboldened or intimidated, determined or defeated. Reading Hello, Kitty and Other Stories left me with the vague feeling of watching footage captured by security cameras, offering a vivid playback of people’s step-by-step operations, but no access to their hearts. Bai Run, Phoebe, and Kitty remain strangers to me. But if it was the author’s very intention to immerse readers in the sense of disconnection, inscrutability, and alienation that plagues a materialistic and purposeless era, then Stevenson-Yang has succeeded.

I was left wondering about something else besides the inner lives of the characters: the potential reception of the collection in two countries: the United States and China (with the understanding that readers in the second locale may not have ready access to the work). Hello, Kitty is a bicultural creation, written by an American author who lived in China for over a quarter of a century, featuring Chinese and American characters whose footprints cover both countries. In China, people love to complain about the small irritations and large miseries of life—at least in private—but loathe it when a porously defined “outsider” points out the same problems. They grant themselves permission to complain about the fleas (as well as torn lining and fraying sleeves), but if the unflattering comment is perceived to have come from without, then they may feel compelled to defend the magnificence of the robe. In the United States, the popularity of China-themed English-language fiction, or lack thereof, is as much about the works per se as it is about illuminating the sensibilities and circumstances of their readers. In her 2008 analysis of popular memoirs about the Cultural Revolution penned by members of the Chinese diaspora, for example, Lingchei Letty Chen argues that the theme serves to reaffirm the values of freedom and democracy that Western powers have advocated and fought for, offering comfort to the moral and emotional vulnerability felt in post–Cold War and post-9/11 society. In the wake of the disputed yet influential “China shock” theory—which frames China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization as a watershed moment that brought prosperity for China but triggered a host of economic declines and social problems in the United States—I wonder how a book that exposes the bleakness beneath the glorious robe might be received on this side of the Pacific.