Issue 4: Cherry Zheng
Photo by Julia Faragher.
“It is as they promise. My cubicle is small but spotless, and each evening I wake up in it with the whole night ahead to kill.”
~ The easiest job in the world by Cherry Zheng
Your short story “The easiest job in the world,” explores a dystopian future where workers can literally ‘switch off’ from their workday. Can you tell us a bit more about the inspiration behind this piece?
Before graduating, I asked my friends how to make the most of my last months of university. There was consensus about one thing: all my recently full-time pals were exhausted. "Enjoy your free time," they said, with finality.
I began office work, began to understand: the loss of daylight, the blink-and-it's-over weekends. The blurring together of Monday and Wednesday. The growing fog over your eyes as something gnaws away at the innocent expectations you didn't realise you still had. It is a slow-burn horror story, repeated on a generational scale—and I was one of the lucky ones.
How many of us squeeze our "real lives" into those slender hours between clocking off and lights out? How many of us hold on by promising ourselves we'll just push through one more week, as if two days is enough to recover from bone-marrow exhaustion?
I started this story by introducing a fantasy that we could switch off, literally, from mind-numbing work. But we must be careful to fantasise about smart systems as a panacea to societal problems. If we don't change the underlying structures, we will simply perpetuate over-work with ever greater precision and inescapability. After all, who controls those technologies?
What draws you to speculative fiction? Who are some of your favourite authors writing in the genre?
I have always found a home in speculative fiction. As my parents speak limited English, Australia did not feel real to me for a long time, at least in terms of the one described to me versus the one I experienced.
I love the fun and freedom of imagined worlds, its constructed rules, its extremes. And if there is something you want to say, you can strip away the cloth of realism (which, feeling like an outsider, I felt I could never portray anyway) and go straight for the heart, like shooting an arrow.
In terms of writing style, I love the lush prose of Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer. For favourite writing (albeit in translation), I will always be inspired by the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. He does with fantasy what you more often see in sci-fi: take a concept (e.g. a library containing all the books ever) and stretch it to the nth degree, with breathtaking results.
What other creative projects are you currently working on?
I recently completed a few months of advanced Chinese study, during which I began working on creative pieces in Chinese. I can’t promise anything yet, except to say that this is opening a new world of expression and love for what language can do. It feels different to write for an imagined audience for which Chineseness is taken for granted, and the foreign Australian bits are what demand explanation instead. I used to feel repelled by 'diaspora writing' as I found it inauthentic: it felt like I had to sell the most vulnerable parts of myself to break into literary circles, whereas people had little interest in my speculative worlds. I am gradually finding a way to do both in a way that feels authentic to myself.
What is at the top of your reading list for 2023?
I'm looking forward to reading the two posthumous works of Taiwanese queer writer Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile. I've also bought a translated Ocean Vuong - I'm so curious how the translator renders his gorgeous words into Chinese.
Cherry Zheng recently completed her Honours thesis in Asian Studies at the Australian National University. She has previously been published in Overland.