May-lee Chai, "Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories" (Blair, 2022‪)‬ Grinnell College: Authors and Artists

In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai's latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai (Blair, 2022) explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality--always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power. These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.
Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com.