The Moons: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog

by Yuxin Zhao

The Moons documents an intimate affair between two women living on opposite sides of Earth, a relationship confined mostly to a messaging app. The wax and wane of this seemingly doomed long-distance entanglement gets tethered with the raw details of the narrator's day-to-day—most of the text, in fact, is lifted straight from her private journals, which permit voyeuristic access into her secret inner circle. Fragments of autofiction in varied formats are woven in to further explore themes of queerness, desire, identity, reality versus virtuality, the private versus public self, immigration, displacement, time, family, history, and political oppression. Emerging from this patchwork of confessions is a courageous disclosure of inevitable heartbreak—the narrator attempts to reconcile her sexuality and global modernity with her traditional Chinese identity, and to adapt her collective ancestral memory and biorhythmic mood swings to the gravity of the present day.

246 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 2024