Useful Phrases for Immigrants
Stories
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In the title story of this timely and innovative collection, a young woman wearing a Prada coat attempts to redeem a coupon for plastic storage bins while her in-laws are at home watching the Chinese news and taking her private phone calls. It is the lively and wise juxtaposition of cultures, generations, and emotions that characterize May-lee Chai’s amazing stories. Within them, readers will find a complex blend of cultures spanning China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and finally, the world at large.
With luminous prose and sharp-eyed observations, Chai reveals her characters’ hopes and fears, and our own: a grieving historian seeking solace from an old lover in Beijing, a young girl discovering her immigrant mother's infidelity, workers constructing a shopping mall in central China who make a shocking discovery. Families struggle with long-held grudges, reinvent traditions, and make mysterious visits to shadowy strangers from their past—all rendered with economy and beauty.
With hearts that break and sometimes mend, with families who fight and sometimes forgive, the timely stories in Useful Phrases for Immigrants illuminate complicated lives with empathy and passion. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
