Useful Phrases for Immigrants

August 27, 2018
Chai’s astute collection explores the Chinese diasporic experience, spanning both China and America. Though not all the protagonists are immigrants, they are all displaced in some way. These include Xiao Yu, a young village boy who cleans fish in a city restaurant so his family can raise money for a lawyer for his father (“Fish Boy”), to the various characters in “The Body,” from the developer to the crooked Daoist priest who capitalizes on superstition to the reporter trying to catch a big break who all find themselves complicit in the discovery of a murdered woman’s body. Guili, the protagonist of the title story, has recently immigrated to America with her husband to find opportunity, only to find they’ve missed the crest of the wave of prosperity. In “First Carvel in Beijing,” one of the collection’s best stories, Chinese-American narrator Jun-li sleeps with her white ex-girlfriend in Beijing as a way of avoiding coming to terms with her own grief. There are some gems here, though Chai is unfortunately not immune to deploying common immigrant narrative tropes. Nevertheless, Chai thoughtfully depicts the loneliness of displacement, combining empathy and nuance to craft stories that are compassionate, illuminating, and sometimes brilliant.

August 15, 2018
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.

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Starred review from October 1, 2018
With her masterful short story collection, Chai proves with exquisite craftsmanship that less can be so much more. The eight stories making up this slim volume focus on characters trying to make sense of changing literal and metaphorical landscapes. In quiet moments of family drama, Chai shines a light on the deeper truths without needing to spell them out. Ghost Festivals shifts between the present and the past as a young woman deals with her extended family's reaction to her uncle's homosexuality, her own bisexuality, and her parents' complicated relationship. In Fish Boy, a boy fresh from the countryside grows streetwise but disillusioned after migrating to Zhengzhou. Canada features a young Taiwanese-American girl dealing with the excitement and horror of her first training bra. In the collection's stand-out, The Body, five different narrators react to a body found at a metropolitan Chinese construction site, tackling issues of corruption, migrant workers, media sensationalism, and religion?all while telling a compelling story in fewer than 20 pages. The concise tales in this literary gem linger in the mind long after the pages are turned.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)