The “six” in Dinner for Six is the number at the assembled table when a Chinese widow and widower form a temporary family with their respective son and daughter each. Author Lu Min, in this translation from Nicky Harman and Helen Wang, first focuses on the widow’s son Ash, who becomes shaped by all the sympathy from the community after his father’s death. This death itself is not addressed for the point of interest is the Crossroads, a neighborhood in the shadow of factories.
The factory zone was in the northernmost outskirts of the city, like an enclave that has been flung out into the open. But the air was anything but open; it was heavy and close, with a tendency to wrap itself around everything, to embrace with a passion, and inveigle its way into your nostrils and throat and down into your lungs. Sometimes it stank of hydrogen sulphide, as though a clutch of rotten eggs had taken to the sky. Or the cloying smell of rust. Or the rotten fish stench of nitrogen. Or, worst of all, xylene, which has that hard burnt-oil smell that makes your throat feel tight, as though someone has grabbed your neck from behind.
The toxicity of the emitted air swirls around Ash as insidiously as the women’s sympathy.
The moment they spotted him, their hands shot out, jostling to stroke his head, his ears, his skinny little arms, his back, right down to his little bottom and his thighs… The women’s hands, overly familiar and unrestrained, left indelible imprints on Ash. Long after the physical sensations creeping up and down his body had faded, they sent octopus-like tentacles deep into his brain that were knobbly, sticky, and impossible to shake off. This unpleasant feeling grew like a mould on his childhood, silently permeating his entire youth.

Within this environment, where no one’s activity is missed, Ash’s mother Su Qin initiates a relationship with widower Ding Bogang, and pretends that her minor subterfuges will conceal from the community the intimate nature of their relationship. The children are uncomfortable with this makeshift family that gathers weekly. Min shifts perspective from each of the adults, and each of the children, to show the pressures of striving within and beyond the limited Crossroads.
As if their polarity had suddenly changed, Su Qin abruptly breaks off the relationship with Din Bogang, and yet her daughter Marina and his son Victor feel even more drawn to each other. Victor was once a child prodigy, and his father hasn’t accepted that he plateaued, despite the wish embedded in his name, and doesn’t pursue secondary education. In contrast, Marina continues her upwardly mobile trajectory, but feels conflicted as she tries to escape the Crossroads, as her feelings for Victor and attachment to her family persist.
Marina had never denied that her hatred for her humble origins arose from those visits downtown. It grew so intense that it made her teeth chatter. The factory zone, her obese brother, her fornicating mother, her drunken almost-stepfather, her almost-stepbrother and sister. She hated all this vulgarity! She felt like she had vicious barbs all over her body that she couldn’t control. If only she could puncture her own despair
With an accident in the Crossroads bringing them back in proximity, the two families have to wrestle with the disconnect between the status and material comforts they thought they wanted, and how it actually feels to have it. Lu Min gives no tidy answers, but deftly shows each of their perspectives, with the plangency of the Crossroads that formed them.
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