Review by Booklist Review
In her newest story collection, Chai (Useful Phrases for Immigrants, 2018) shifts dexterously between the personal and the fantastical. Four of the eight stories feature autobiographical stand-ins who are, like Chai, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother whose formative years are defined by ignorance, bigotry, and family dysfunction. Difficult mother-daughter relationships haunt "Hong's Mother" and "Jia." "White Rabbits" and "Slow Train to Beijing" place the protagonists in Nanjing, where Chai also spent a year abroad. Chai shifts outward in "Tomorrow in Shanghai," portraying a doctor financing his "imminent marriage" by harvesting the organs of executed prisoners. In "Life on Mars," a Chinese teen sent to the U.S. learns that his first lessons will be about race, privilege, and money. Two grad-school friends feel powerless against their sexual-predator professor in "The Monkey King of Sichuan." Chai turns speculative in "The Nanny," in which clones and cyborgs might be the best option for creating families. Deftly woven throughout is the universal longing for connection, between children and parents, wannabe and established lovers, even man and machines.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Chai (Useful Phrases for Immigrants) showcases in her insightful collection protagonists attempting to figure out their roles in their families and careers. In the gritty and poignant title story, a young Shanghai doctor uneasily travels to the Chinese countryside to extract organs after a prisoner's execution--"not an ideal job," he admits, but he's deep in debt. The doctor gives the condemned man a sedative to avoid a second shot from the firing squad, but refrains from watching the execution, and instead reflects on his lost youth and turns up his nose at the uncouth rural guards. In "Life on Mars," set in the late 1990s, teenager Guo Yu describes his new life in Denver in alien terms after relocating from China ("It was both exactly like and nothing like the America of the movies he'd seen," Yu narrates, struck by the "jade-colored" cornfields). Yu toils at a restaurant job over the summer, though a tutoring gig for the cook's son offers a glimmer of hope. "Hong's Mother" follows a white woman married to a Chinese man who neglects to defend the couple's children from racism in their small Midwestern town. At 19, their daughter, Hong, is dismayed her mother is going to visit her in France while she's studying abroad, but goes to extreme lengths to ensure her mother has a good trip, feeling yet again she doesn't measure up. Throughout, Chai commits brilliantly to the characters' competing drives for self-determination and approval, and conveys them with perfect subtlety. This slim but wide-ranging work is a great achievement. (Aug.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Tales showing the tension and turmoil experienced by Chinese and Chinese American characters facing the binaries of city and country, men and women, home and away. In "The Nanny," the longest story from Chai's second collection--following Useful Phrases for Immigrants (2018)--a woman named Anping travels to the New Shanghai Colony on Mars to work as a nanny for a 4-year-old girl. Anping is excited to earn a much higher salary than she had been, though most of the money will go toward paying down her debt back on Earth. As the story unfolds, Anping discovers there is much she doesn't know about her new employers. Unlike "The Nanny," most of the stories here are firmly grounded in an all-too-familiar America, and the secrets they hold are hidden only to those who refuse to see them. Chai's narrators are often young Chinese Americans who experience racism in persistent, erosive ways. In "The Monkey King of Sichuan," two women meet up and discuss their former professor, an expert in Asian studies, who sexually harassed one of them during their graduate program. Several of the stories feature protagonists similar to Chai herself--the daughter of a Chinese father and a White American mother. In "Jia" (the Chinese word for family or home), Lu-lu, a little girl newly arrived in the Midwest with her parents, is shocked to discover her neighbors' open disdain for her family. (We see a college-aged Lu-lu in the following story, "Slow Train to Beijing," falling in love with a woman engaged to a White male doctoral student.) Chai is straightforward in style, but her earnest, astute chronicling of the impact of the cruelties that people inflict on each other, whether in a small town on Earth or on a terraformed Mars, is powerful. Chai bears cleareyed witness, with righteous anger swirling beneath her pellucid prose. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
