A Love Story That Could Only Happen in Flushing

By
Mythili Rao
WNYC News | Feb 2, 2015

If you stay on the 7 train long enough, it will carry you 6.7 miles across Queens, over the Grand Central Parkway and past CitiField to Main Street, Flushing.

This predominantly Asian neighborhood is where Zou Lei, a fictional Chinese-Muslim immigrant, arrives in the early pages of Atticus Lish's new novel Preparation for the Next Life.

It's also where Lish lived when he dropped out of Harvard and moved to New York in 1993. He had long been interested in Chinese culture; as a kid, he was a big fan of Bruce Lee. That had led him to study Mandarin.

Lish lived in Queens for just one year, but it was enough time to start imagining the character of Zou Lei: a brave, penniless immigrant from the persecuted Uighur community of northwest China.

"When I started writing this book, I came out here to Flushing, I came to Cromlin St., I collared some guy, saw him coming out of his house — he was a Chinese gentleman — and I said, 'could you let me inside your house to look around?'" Lish said. "And believe it or not, the guy did."

In the novel, Zou Lei lives in a partitioned apartment similar to one Lish saw in real life, where plywood boards created small single-occupancy sheds.

The daughter of a soldier, Zou Lei maintains a vigorous workout regimen even as she struggles to make enough money to eat. She is doing exercises during a break from her job at one of Flushing Mall’s Chinese restaurants when a newly-returned Iraq War veteran named Brad Skinner runs into her. 

Atticus Lish's first novel tells the story of an illegal Chinese-Muslim immigrant who works at the Flushing Mall.
(Mythili Rao/WNYC)
  
Skinner is damaged and lonely, but kind, too. Soon, they fall in love. New York Times book critic Dwight Garner called it “perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade.” 
 
The fast-food joint that inspired Lish is not much to look at.  A large menu lists delicacies like “Fried Chicken Leg” and “Squid balls on Rice."  
As Zou Lei ekes out a living at the restaurant, Skinner tries to readjust into civilian life. His PTSD doesn't make it easy.
 
"Most soldiers are highly integrated in their unit," Lish says. "Now he’s gone from that and so he's cast adrift in the civilian world.  I think maybe he doesn’t have as much inside him to sustain himself."
 
Preparation for the Next Life is more than a story about survival and sustenance. It’s about the fragile dream of building a better life, one day at a time, at the end of the 7 line, in Flushing, Queens. 
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Mythili Rao

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