The Little Restaurant

Wang Anyi’s short stories in The Little Restaurant illuminate the emotional and intellectual complexity of the lives of the multiple generations caught up in China. Some of her short stories describe the lives of young students caught up in the Cultural Revolution who were sent away to rural communities across China to be educated and tempered in a hardscrabble existence; other stories revolve around the seemingly quiet lives of ordinary citizens in the city of Shanghai. In simple language and with an eye for detail, she describes their simple physical existence and their complex interior lives. Her descriptions are often realistic, affectionate and vivid yet somehow they remain evocative and haunting. Creating poetry out of the ordinary and the mundane, her stories are at once both stark and deeply poetic.