Home Remedies

March 4, 2019
Wang’s formidable imagination is on full display in this wide-ranging debut collection about modern Chinese youth. Her characters include artistic and aimless 20-year-olds eking out a living shooting subversive music videos for bands in Beijing (“Days of Being Mild”); a Chinese-American girl in Paris, who finds her life changed when she begins wearing a dead girl’s clothes (“Echo of the Moment”); and a struggling writer who receives a mysterious gadget in the mail that ages whatever she puts into it, whether it’s avocadoes, wine, or her cat (“Future Cat”). Wang plays with form as well, as in “Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments,” written as a catalogue of such ailments as “Inappropriate Feelings” and “Bilingual Heartache,” or “Algorithm Problem Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships,” which allows a computer science–minded Chinese immigrant father to apply his discipline’s techniques to his relationship with his second-generation Chinese-American daughter. One of the best stories in the collection is “Vaulting the Sea,” in which Taoyu, an Olympic hopeful synchronized diver, struggles with complicated feelings for his partner Hai against a greater backdrop of sacrifice, ambition, and tragedy. Though some of the stories’ narrative momentum can’t match the consistently excellent characters, nonetheless Wang proves herself a promising writer with a delightfully playful voice and an uncanny ability to evoke empathy, nostalgia, and wonder.

March 15, 2019
In her debut, Wang examines the difficulties of immigration as sources of pain, connection, and confusion between friends, family, and would-be lovers.Wang's narrators come from all walks of life, from the poorest factory towns of rural Henan to the richest high-rises of Beijing. Yet they all struggle with feelings of alienation and distance from the people they should love the most--a state of unbelonging and disconnection spurred by migration. In "Mott Street in July," overworked immigrant parents drift away from their three children, leaving them to survive on their own in New York's Chinatown. In "Fuerdai to the Max," a spoiled rich kid who counts himself one of the "fuerdai," or "second-generation rich," tries to outrun the consequences of a brutal assault designed to keep the powers of his social circle intact. "Why should I care?" he asks himself, defensively. "Nobody cared what I did. I never had anybody to answer to." Wang's stories are spare and haunting, with endings that leave characters just as unsettled as their beginnings. Only occasionally do they turn tender, as in the exquisite "Vaulting the Sea," in which an Olympic hopeful decides to end his career after realizing his diving partner will never love him back. The collection is strongest when it fully embraces Wang's love of the uncanny as a way to parse generational misunderstanding or the surreality of contemporary life. "Echo of the Moment" offers a satisfying contemporary riff on the Narcissus myth and digital culture. Echo, a young Chinese-American student living in Paris, steals the couture from a suicide's apartment only to find that the clothes transform her into a viral sensation online--and that they might drive her to the same fate. And "The Art of Straying Off Course" moves in a compressed narrative time reminiscent of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, allowing an old woman--on her way to vacation in space--the opportunity to examine her early choices in life and love with the tender gaze of experience. "Behind me, through the window, all the places I am trying to leave behind," she thinks. "All that wonderful chaos, horizontal, never-ending." A sharp and poignant collection.

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June 14, 2019

DEBUT This delightful debut collection of 12 stories should land on multiple must-read lists. Wang has captured the spirit and energy of contemporary Chinese youth seeking adventures abroad while navigating geographical and cultural boundaries. Most of the stories are set in the United States, but China never seems far away for some of Wang's families, especially the parents of her Chinese youth. Several tales stand out for capturing the collision of traditions, values, generations, and even technologies. "Fuerdai to the Max" reveals the unhappy homecoming of a college-age narrator after he and some friends, most of them among China's noveau riche, have assaulted a classmate. In "Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments," Wang cleverly exposes the dimensions of a young woman's familial relationships by creating a series of ailments, such as regrets, humiliation, or baby fever, then offers up ridiculously humorous cures. VERDICT Wang's stories are funny, generous, and surprising as they introduce a youthful demographic that is growing worldwide. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2019
Something amazing had to happen . . . something incredible had to come true. In Wang's excellent debut collection of 12 short stories, her characters all share the hope of becoming something extraordinary. In "White Tiger of the West," a young boy wishes to become someone great, but, despite his self-proclaimed title of spiritual Grandmaster Tutu and thorough studies of qi, he cannot escape his ordinariness. The group of Chinese millennials in "Days of Being Mild" yearn to become respected artists and filmmakers. Their greatest desire is not to make money, but to prove that they are different from the generations before them. In "For Our Children," Xiao Gang is given a chance to avoid his destiny of becoming a farmer just like his ancestors before him, but a green card, a job, and a rich new life in California come with a price: marry an older woman with Down syndrome. In these stories and others, Wang boldly explores what it means to be a Chinese millennial and seamlessly captures the longing of an emerging generation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)