In her 1944 essay “Writing of One’s Own”, Eileen Chang wrote “I do not like heroics. I like tragedy and, even better, desolation”. Twenty-one years earlier, in his speech “What happens after Nora leaves home?”, discussing the ending of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Lu Xun raised the awkward question of what will become of a woman after her liberation if she has no viable means to support herself materially.

If they were alive today, each of these two mainstays of the Chinese canon may have been keen to read Zhang Yueran’s Women, Seated—the latest translation of her works to English by trusted collaborator Jeremy Tiang.

Women, Seated tells the story of nanny and housekeeper to the ultra-rich, Yu Ling, and Kuan Kuan, the boy in her care. At the opening, she is midway through executing a scheme concocted with her lover to kidnap and ransom Kuan Kuan, but the plan collapses when the boy’s family vanish after becoming embroiled in a classic Chinese corruption scandal, in which the arrest of the patriarch signals the downfall of his entire clique, and where the publicly reported crime is unlikely to tell the full story. Thus, Yu Ling has no ransom, and no takers for the boy.

Abandoned by her lover and in lieu of a plan B, Yu Ling resolves to care for Kuan Kuan in his family’s luxurious home. With only one or two brief excursions, the story unfolds in this one home, in a community of the ultra-rich somewhere on the fringes of Beijing. Yu Ling has no income, no financial or emotional support from outside, and no long-term objective. She knows there are hidden cameras dotted all around the house and garden, but has no idea who might be watching. Trapped in ambivalence toward her circumstances and unwilling to abandon the innocent boy, she reaches back into memories of her unloving working class family and her quietly fraught relationship with Kuan Kuan’s mother, Qin Wen.

Here, the Eileen Chang of “Writing of One’s Own” might have appreciated Zhang’s characterisation of Yu Ling not as a bold hero, nor a rational calculator, nor a martyr. “Desolate” is a good fit for this woman of few words. Yu Ling is ruled by her own troubled heart, exhibiting restraint but also constrained—by poverty, circumstance, and at times her dignity. She frequently demonstrates intelligence, but also slips of judgement and a lack of high cultural education. She is a character who can keep her cards behind her back, but may also forget their value—one who can stand up for herself at times; but at others, folds. From start to finish, we see her showing care, but swallowing bitterness.

Lu Xun, a committed leftist who preferred complexity and pessimism to their opposites, might have appreciated Zhang Yueran’s studied collisions of social class and material constraint. Yu Ling is far more skilled than Qin Wen in almost everything that matters. The latter leads an expensive Westernised lifestyle, but it is her housekeeper who has both the taste and skill to bake European bread and cakes. And yet, with her daily subjugation cast off, Yu Ling would have no access to the kitchen and ingredients that allowed her to expand her culinary knowhow westward. Qin Wen can buy any object, service, or success (in her hobby of highbrow painting) she wishes—but when stripped of her accustomed protections, she admits to Yu Ling that she has always been conscious of the emptiness and contingency of this unearned privilege.

Women, Seated even features a doll’s house of its own: the “swan hotel” of the book’s original Chinese title. During the kidnapping attempt, Kuan Kuan spots a truck full of geese on the highway, and—after misidentifying them as swans—declares that he wants to take care of them. As a compromise, the kidnappers buy one goose from the understandably puzzled driver and take it home. Kuan Kuan, a sweet but spoiled soul, puts up a tent which he declares is a “swan hotel”. He proves as oblivious to the goose’s disinterest in the proposed bedroom as he is to its species, preferring malformed fantasy to considering an animal on its own terms. Yu Ling, indulging him, feeds the goose and lets the tent stay up.

The boy, the bird, and the tent reproduce the story in miniature: a well-meaning but irrational kindness produces an environment where the outsider is fed but does not fit, and cannot last. The socioeconomic relationship between nanny and child, with the economic component wrenched out. A sweet but nonviable fantasy, like a bubble waiting to pop.

As Women, Seated moves into its final act, arrivals and incursions in the house bring both the cold sting of reality and fresh delusions. The novel’s English title comes into its own, as the boy-nanny relationship expands to incorporate three more women. There is Qin Wen seeking refuge, a would-be mistress seeking a free ride, and Kuan Kuan’s concerned teacher, Miss Amy. As the various ladies sit and talk it becomes clear that Miss Amy is the only of the four whose finances do not trace neatly back to Kuan Kuan’s father, whose own corporate power is owed to the state power of his Qin Wen’s father. Zhang does not only examine these dependencies under patriarchy in China, but also depicts how the gilded cage in which these women spend their lives shapes their choices, desires, frustrations, and avenues for human connection.

At the level of manners, Zhang correlates working for a living with empathy and emotional maturity. Qin Wen’s thin-skinned selfishness has ingrained to the point of habit, and the would-be mistress gets on well with Kuan Kuan precisely because her personality is stuck in childhood: insensitive, reactive, dependent. Yu Ling and Miss Amy each have their own flaws, but both possess the quiet centre that employment necessitates. Tantrums are the privilege of the few.

Beyond the fantasy-within-a-fantasy of the misconceived “swan hotel” and the sealed-off pseudo-family-home containing it, there is a bigger, broader dreamland outside. The pampered neighbourhood the home sits in is inaccessible by public transport and governed on the surface by an overzealous neighbourhood committee run, it appears, by underemployed housewives.

Beneath the surface, this far-flung suburbia is made possible by demarcation. Namely, the widening gulf of inequality separating working Chinese families that produce precarious women like Yu Ling from elite clans that produce boys with American passports like Kuan Kuan. And just as Ibsen did not tell his audience what would become of Nora after his play’s end, so Zhang Yueran leaves the reader to speculate how Yu Ling will continue to feed and house herself, and whether Kuan Kuan will grow up to become a power player like his father, a cultural coaster like his mother, or a Chinese-American trust fund kid, or indeed whether wealth and privilege will escape him as the law—for better or worse—pops the bubble.

Angus Stewart founded the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast and has written for publications including Cha, Typebar and STAT.