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
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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