Three

Novel · 149 pages · Publication (expected): October 2026 · Joyland Editions (ARC)

One story she tells only once

In Na Zhong’s Three, N recognises her parents across a street in her hometown. They are older. In her absence, they have made a life of their own.

N is the daughter. The novel names her father Y and calls her mother, a schoolteacher, the woman. After the opening reunion, it begins again with the woman’s childhood. It moves through three generations. Her story comes before her daughter’s. By the time the woman turns her grievances on N, their origins are on the page.

The woman grows up in a household that shares its affection unequally. Her father favours her younger sister. When she wants to study art, her mother changes her university applications. The woman carries these injuries into adulthood and recounts them to N again and again. Each telling asks for sympathy.

One memory is different. Left behind at kindergarten as a girl, the woman presses her fingernails into a pear until brown marks cover its skin. She tells N about it once and cries before finishing. The ruined pear affects her daughter more deeply than the familiar stories of deprivation.

At home, the woman demands repayment for the sacrifices of motherhood. Her furious accusations of ingratitude leave N frightened and submissive. N learns what ends them. She apologises and comforts her mother. Zhong enters the woman’s consciousness during one outburst and records her satisfaction in exercising authority over someone unable to retaliate. The girl who marked the pear now has a daughter from whom she can demand the affection she was denied.

The principal of the woman’s school wants N withdrawn from a prestigious city school. The woman says no. Remembering her own mother’s interference, she protects her daughter’s place. She is demoted and fined.

Y cooks and cares for the family. His attempts to intervene during the outbursts make them worse. He withdraws. N comes to resent him for leaving her exposed. Zhong writes Y largely through his actions and shows less of his thinking than of either woman’s.

F, a childhood acquaintance pursuing postgraduate studies in the United States, brings N into a second household. His wealthy father expects gratitude and deference for the advantages he provides, as the woman does at home, with more money behind the demand. F’s mother, M, treats N with warmth. N finds M’s affection easier to receive than her own mother’s. At a dinner before N and F marry, F’s father humiliates N’s parents. N leaves with them the following morning.

Zhong explains too much at the dinner in F’s family mansion. The seating plan puts N’s parents below F’s father, and N is expected to serve the wine. That shows whose house it is. The narration still casts F’s father as a king and M as his queen, in an extended fairy tale that explains an order the dinner has made plain. Zhong tells the pear story without comment.

By the time the narrative catches up with the opening reunion, the factory in N’s hometown has closed and familiar buildings have disappeared. Her parents occupy an apartment she has never inhabited. Washing her hands in cold water, N remembers her father preparing hot water for the family each winter. She now enjoys comforts her parents still lack.

In the kitchen, the woman prepares soup and Y peels vegetables. N asks whether they need help. The daughter who recognised them across a street has entered a home her parents have made without her. Zhong adds almost nothing to the scene. The soup and the peeled vegetables are enough. Where Zhong stops to explain, as she does at the mansion, the book is weaker for it.