I hadn’t read “Severance” but then I decided to read this collection of short stories and will most certainly go and read her novel. The stories in this collection are surreal, funny, satirical, and extremely confident, though not all of them, but they do the job of making the reader think, feel, and be surprised as well with every turn of the page.
We meet Chinese American women trying so hard, processing their dislocation, their loneliness and how to make sense of the world they are thrown into. In “G” two friends want to relive their youth by going all-out into the night. “Office Hours”, “Peking Duck”, and “Tomorrow” are laced with an equal amount of humour and empathy. “Peking Duck” will make you relook at ethics and what it means to be moral – and more than anything about how narratives change, and so do narrators.
“Los Angeles” and “Yeti Lovemaking” were my favourite stories from the lot. They are peculiar, wry, and stuns you into thinking about other worlds. Her stories stay with you – with their jagged edges and imperfect threads. They exist for that reason alone – to make you see how these characters navigate life and the world at large, unpredictable in their ways, and often quite hilarious.
Of Books and Reading 