When I was a little girl, I grew up in the shadow of my grandmother’s antique china hutch: ornately carved, dark oak with yellowed mirrors, a set of enormous painted roosters observing our household from the top shelf. For many families in the USSR, these china hutches were not mere pieces of furniture, but a repository of projected hope: the ‘good’ china for some momentous future occasion; prized sweets, spirits, linens not to be used but to be stored, in the hopes that one day the world and those in the household will be worthy of their loveliness. 

Thus, it is no surprise that Dariya Talasbayeva’s story resonated deeply with this reader. However, it is not mere familiarity that sets apart this story. The narrator, whose wry observations about the daily life of the Family bring to mind Pelevin’s Shed XVII (though the china hutch is neither naive nor confused about its place in the world), is not a mere symbolic nod or gimmick. While the protagonist of this story is not human, it is what his reflections say about the human world that stay with the reader; the questions of what do we fight to keep, how much are we willing to sacrifice to project our history onto the future; and, ultimately, what does it take to move on from the golden haze that often clouds our view of the past.