LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO

Qian’s debut collection navigates between New York and Los Angeles, the U.S. and China, as it follows its young Asian and Asian American women through the languid menace of youth.

In this promising collection’s opening story, “Chicken. Film. Youth,” Luna is back in her childhood city, LA, meeting up with friends who have all reached the point in their late 20s when they have “switched from wanting to get older to feeling like [they] could stand to be a little bit younger.” When the reader sees her again in “Zeroes:Ones,” she is just out of college, living in Suzhou, and working at the university language center as a tutor while she explores her complicated feelings about China as a “country both homeland and exotic.” Luna’s wanderings thread through the collection—she appears as a main character in four of the 11 stories—but the interstitial longing she feels about her Asian American identity, her sense of isolation, the aimlessness of adulthood after the driving promise of youth, and the driving question of what comes next are the guiding forces behind all the stories in this lovely but sometimes listless book. Often, the dominantly female main characters are lured into situations that fizz with menace—such as Nora in “Monitor World,” who matches with the mysterious agamemnon_the_king on a site for “lovers of the underground” only to discover that his sexual prowess hides darker, and somehow more quotidian, desires; or Emi in the title story, who runs into a childhood friend in Tokyo and shortly afterward finds herself isolated in a house on the slopes of Mount Haruna, participating in an ominous conceptual art project sponsored by the cultish Anti-Civilization Committee. Sometimes, as in the standout stories “The Girl With the Double Eyelids,” “Power and Control,” and “Seagull Village,” a world with alternative rules in which visions reveal hidden truths, alchemy is a black-market hobby, and spirits roam freely is laid over our own to reveal startling and subtle truths. More often than not, however, both the sense of threat and magic fizzle out in the face of the stifling ennui that keeps most of Qian’s characters enacting the same apathetic orbits even when they attempt radical escape.

Luminously written stories that do not quite finish telling their tales.