Lightly plotted but emotionally intricate tales about the risks we take in trying to belong.
Longing characterizes the lives of Chinese and Chinese-American families in this solid short story collection.
In the title story, there is a moment when the protagonist, Guili, reflects back regretfully on her family’s decision to xia hai, a phrase that translates roughly as "to jump into the sea of commerce," or to leave a stable job for something riskier. In Guili’s case, she and her husband left good jobs in China to come to America “only to discover everywhere they looked, there were Chinese who’d come earlier…started mindless businesses, and made a fortune.” These are the characters that fascinate Chai (Training Days, 2017, etc.): the ones who feel that “invisible lines” have been drawn “between themselves and the rest of the world.” There is the young girl just discovering an attraction to other women who watches her uncle’s homosexuality cause irreparable rifts in her extended family (“Ghost Festivals”). An 11-year-old’s apprehension over getting a new training bra causes her to see her mother in a new, disappointing light (“Canada”). Teenage Xiao Yu, a migrant worker who leaves the countryside to work at a city restaurant, learns toughness to survive his unsavory surroundings (“Fish Boy”). Chai uses similar narrative structures and even repeated details to link the stories, though this sometimes serves to make them run together rather than acting as a successful unifying device. (The supernatural noir story “The Body” is a satisfying departure from the rest of the pack.) But Chai’s confident writing and insights into characters wanting, but unable, to fit in—whether because of class, sexuality, ethnicity, or the everyday complications of human connection—make her a writer to remember.
Lightly plotted but emotionally intricate tales about the risks we take in trying to belong.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-932112-76-7
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Blair
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Told through the points of view of the four Garcia sisters- Carla, Sandi, Yolanda and Sofia-this perceptive first novel by poet Alvarez tells of a wealthy family exiled from the Dominican Republic after a failed coup, and how the daughters come of age, weathering the cultural and class transitions from privileged Dominicans to New York Hispanic immigrants. Brought up under strict social mores, the move to the States provides the girls a welcome escape from the pampered, overbearingly protective society in which they were raised, although subjecting them to other types of discrimination. Each rises to the challenge in her own way, as do their parents, Mami (Laura) and Papi (Carlos). The novel unfolds back through time, a complete picture accruing gradually as a series of stories recounts various incidents, beginning with ``Antojos'' (roughly translated ``cravings''), about Yolanda's return to the island after an absence of five years. Against the advice of her relatives, who fear for the safety of a young woman traveling the countryside alone, Yolanda heads out in a borrowed car in pursuit of some guavas and returns with a renewed understanding of stringent class differences. ``The Kiss,'' one of Sofia's stories, tells how she, married against her father's wishes, tries to keep family ties open by visiting yearly on her father's birthday with her young son. And in ``Trespass,'' Carla finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice a year after the Garcias have arrived in America, culminating with a pervert trying to lure her into his car. In perhaps one of the most deft and magical stories, ``Still Lives,'' young Sandi has an extraordinary first art lesson and becomes the inspiration for a statue of the Virgin: ``Dona Charito took the lot of us native children in hand Saturday mornings nine to twelve to put Art into us like Jesus into the heathen.'' The tradition and safety of the Old World are just part of the tradeoff that comes with the freedom and choice in the New. Alvarez manages to bring to attention many of the issues-serious and light-that immigrant families face, portraying them with sensitivity and, at times, an enjoyable, mischievous sense.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-945575-57-2
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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