Books & the Arts / March 27, 2026 What Its Like to Serve the Chinese Elite Zhang Yueran’s novel Women, Seated—a take on the upstairs, downstairs drama—examines class conflict among the Chinese upper crust and the people who wait on them. Ad Policy A woman cleans the street near the Drum Tower in Beijing, 2025. (Du Xinyi / Xinhua via Getty Images) The Chinese novelist Zhang Yueran has repeatedly returned to one question in her fiction: How do women relate to each other?