What’s it like to be young? Mostly it’s boring. The young student stares at her phone, eats poorly, stays up late, sleeps badly. There’s schoolwork, idols performing on livestreams, Starbucks drinks. Young love, with its exciting and uncertain intrusions into daily life, can play a starring role. But love is repetitive too. By incessantly texting I love you and See you tomorrow, the lovers promise each other a future containing the same blissful boredom as the present.

The soothing monotony of love is the center of Yuxin Zhao’s The Moons, an autofictional novel that follows Y, twenty-four, who is a graduate student in LA. The novel begins in autumn, the Year of the Rooster, the animal whose sign Y was born under. “It’s just a myth,” Y writes, “that you will always have bad luck in your year.” She’s lucky because she’s in love—and unlucky because C, her girlfriend, is back at home in China.

Much of the novel is told through Y’s diary entries, written in lowercase, which detail her relationship with C. Each entry also lists everything that Y eats and drinks: a “small caramel macchiato (hot),” “medium rose latte (iced),” “green iced tea,” and a “large jasmine milk tea with bubbles.” At times, the effect is similar to reading someone’s food restriction diary, especially when Y defers dinner and confesses to being “scared” by overeating.

More engrossing and emotionally acute are Y’s attempts to sustain her long-distance relationship. The lovers grasp at brief slices of time when they’re both online. Y laments in her diary, “when you are 16 hours apart from someone, it becomes especially hard to find a mutually satisfying slot for sleep.” For long-distance lovers, the day is disciplined by time. The two women try to accommodate each other’s timezones, but often resent any temporal separation. 

Affection and longing are inevitably mediated by technology. When Y wakes from a terrifying dream, she’s desperate for a reassuring text from C: “i start to panic and cry out for her, which is to say i send her 3 crying alpaca stickers.” The novel is at its best when depicting and analyzing the strange, alluring experience of long-distance sex, suspended between physical and digital life:

when we are in the middle of virtual sex, i have a habit of exiting our chat and scrolling down the screen, occasionally even opening a new app. sex creates such a division between us and the others that the chat as a space also gets transformed, turning into an isolated, heated room. through frequent exiting and reentering, the difference is repeatedly examined and reaffirmed, and it feels both unreal and strangely soothing.

Happiness requires insulating themselves from the exterior world and retreating into the virtual space where they can be together: “in the morning,” Y writes, “we struggle in bed together because we don’t want to go out into a world that is not ours, we kiss each other goodbye before we have to exit our space, after work we reunite and go back home hand in hand, the reward for another day of adventure in the not-us world.” But the interior world of their relationship can be claustrophobically intense, with frequent “half-fights” due to insecurity, jealousy, and miscommunication. There are other complications: Y’s parents disapprove of her relationship, and C still hasn’t come out to hers.

At times, Y’s curiosity about heterosexual relationships provides a way to process her lesbian experience. The diary entries describe a friend relationship with an on-again-off-again boyfriend whom Y finds unappealing and inconsiderate. But while that relationship is permitted to progress, Y’s long-awaited reunion with her girlfriend, on a rare trip back to China for winter break, is constrained by homophobia. Unable to meet at home, they go on dates to the mall, using the fitting rooms as “temporary spaces of intimacy.” Their in-person meetings are less satisfying than their time together online, where affection can be openly articulated. 

The novel breaks with the diary form to describe the history of Y’s family and how her parents and grandparents met. This material is presented using more traditional orthography, and the first-person voice shifts to a more formal, analytical register. Of her parents, Y writes: “I recall distance: distance, time, separation. I thought my family was the standard model of all families.”

The diary contains fleeting mentions of the world beyond Y’s relationships, including party politics in China. When presidential term limits are abolished, Y follows the news with a mixture of fascination, fear, and anticipation:

things are happening in china. forums are being shut down (temporarily, to be examined and reconfigured), accounts are being deleted on social media […] if i am to speak with as much sincerity as i can afford, i have to admit i feel a bit of excitement deep down, the excitement of witnessing illogical events that might or might not be the foreshadowing of something terrible, of living in what seems like a pivotal moment in history: the possibility of happening, of the unknown, of catastrophe, all mixed up in an excitement that makes me feel ashamed and guilty.

But when political shifts intrude, they mainly prompt Y to telescope back into the self. She idly wonders what the political situation means for her and C’s future. Will “homosexuality be considered disloyalty to the Party”? What will the policy be for lesbians having children? The two women grasp for safety and security, for repeated reassurances of their undying love. Love, for Y, is sustained by affectionate tedium: “my ultimate fantasy,” she writes in her diary, “is for us to lie in bed, me holding her from behind, browsing delivery menus together.” In The Moons, safety resides in the tender monotony of daily existence. But as the novel shifts into spring in the Year of the Dog, the monotony makes the two lovers restless. Boredom is reassuring. But no life, or love, remains undisturbed forever.

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Yuxin Zhao is a writer from Hangzhou, China, who is currently based in the UK. She writes experimental fiction and poetry on migration and/or immigration, family history, and queer desire. Her writing has appeared in Full Stop, 7×7 LA, O BOD, and rivulet. Three Forms of Exhaustion, a chapbook, was published as part of the DanceNotes chaplet series.

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Celine Nguyen is a designer and writer in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in ArtReview, The Atlantic, and the Cleveland Review of Books. She writes the newsletter personal canon about literature, design, and culture.