Melanie Cheng: The Burrow, reviewed by Adele Zhao • Book Review

Fiction by Melanie Cheng, reviewed by Adele Zhao
THE BURROW (Tin House)

As the COVID pandemic recedes further and further in my memory, I sometimes forget that what happened in those years was not really normal. I find it hard to believe that lockdown actually happened. It seems improbable that my grandparents came to stay all the way from China and ended up stuck with us for many months. That time with them is something I will always treasure, even though I didn’t (and still don’t) appreciate Chinese food—and therefore our family dinners—enough to understand how lucky I was to have them there.

Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow is the first book I’ve read set during the pandemic. In 2020, I remember wondering how COVID would manifest in literature. I’d thought that I would prefer it not to as I didn’t want reminders of such a bizarre and surreal era in my books. Alas, great literature reflects real life, and the pandemic is no exception. I often find that I’m affected most by a story when it confronts what I have been avoiding myself. The reading is like a release of tension, a shared burden. Such was my experience with The Burrow.

The novel’s four main characters are Lucie, who is ten years old; Amy and Jin Lee (Lucie’s parents); and Pauline (Lucie’s grandmother). A sense of numbing grief predates the narrative: the family has fractured after the death of Ruby, Lucie’s younger sister, coupled with Pauline’s stroke. They are forced to reunite under the restrictions of lockdown only after Pauline breaks her wrist and cannot stay in the hospital nor remain living alone. Added further to the mix is Lucie’s introverted new bunny, Fiver, named by Pauline for a character in Watership Down. Such a tense living situation seems ripe for volatility, but Cheng delicately manages it without excess dramatics. There’s a sense of a quiet, subdued pressurizing: “A new sensation [Jin] couldn’t place. Something halfway between joy and panic. A kind of seizure of the heart.”

In many aspects, Cheng comes from a similar background to the Lee family. Chinese-Australian, she also studied medicine at university in Melbourne. Aside from novels and short stories, she has published non-fiction articles to do with her experience as a general practitioner. In interviews, she’s stated that she approaches medicine and her writing with the same kind of mindset: empathizing and climbing into other people’s heads.

The narrative of The Burrow takes just that approach, going into the viewpoints of each of the four main characters. The whiplash between them—their interpretations of events and perspectives—underscores the isolation of their hearts despite their collective confinement in close quarters. Aside from conflicts between themselves, this emotional repression reveals itself in secrets kept from others, like Jin’s previous extramarital affair at the hospital where he works and Amy’s inability to write her novel.

The most compelling relationship in the novel is the maternal line of grandmother, mother, and daughter. In many ways, Pauline and Lucie are closer than Lucie and Amy. It’s Pauline who spends time baking and reading with her. Although this doesn’t go unnoticed by Amy, she’s nonplussed by her own apathy: “She saw all these things and she was surprised by how little jealousy she felt.” Perhaps it is easier to be a generation further apart. The relationship between a mother and daughter is rarely simple, a concept that’s frequently explored in film and literature (see: Ladybird, Crying in H-Mart, Everything Everywhere All at Once). Amy often lingers upon the mirror of her younger self, but struggles to find common ground with the daughter who remains. When they do, Lucie remarks that it feels more like a memory: “It reminded Lucie of the hugs her mum used to give her a long time ago. It was like hearing a tune on the radio, which was almost but not quite the same as another equally sad song.”

Lucie is not the only one connecting with memories. In a conversation that I found particularly striking, Amy and Jin start to argue, and Jin brings up the fact that Amy only ever talks about the past. She counters with a fact she learned in a documentary: “He said the past is like that, that it exists alongside the present. Like another city. Another room.” But Jin argues that the past wasn’t ideal: “The past isn’t some perfect thing like you make it out to be. It was unpleasant and flawed and pretty fucked up if I’m going to be honest about it.”

As a writer, I often write about memories to keep them safe in another room, so that I can know that they still exist, somewhere, sometime. Living in the other room, though, means that you are living apart from everybody else. Retreating to familiar and comforting places is self-isolating. I think Jin is right—when you try to return to the past, you’re trying to go somewhere that never really existed.

With all of this unspoken tension, the family is itching for confrontation, something that will bring them back to the present and each other. So, when they do eventually argue, it feels like relief.

If there is one enduring positive memory of the pandemic, it is the fact that it brought everybody closer together. I spent more time with my family and formed friendships with classmates that are still going strong today. Being forced inside can sometimes mean long, hard staring at oneself in a mirror and starting to see others in different lights.

The Burrow deals heavily with loss, grief, and the bonds of family—bonds that are forged before we are born. Though people change many times over, these bonds do not. The novel’s denouement largely involves the acknowledgement of parallel existence. “[Lucie] saw … a patch of fur the color of wheat—not so different from the tuft of golden hair, soft as floating thistle seeds, that had once graced her sister’s forehead.” It forces us to wonder: Can something that is lost ever truly be gone?

Adele Zhao is a fiction writer nationally recognized by Scholastic Art & Writing and YoungArts. Additionally, she attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio in 2024. Her passions include classic literature and coming-of-age films.