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Book Cover for: Tomorrow in Shanghai: Stories, May-Lee Chai

Tomorrow in Shanghai: Stories

May-Lee Chai

Paperback
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Reader Score

76%

76% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

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A short story collection exploring cultural complexities in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and the world at large.

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 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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Blair
  • Publish Date: Aug 30th, 2022
  • Pages: 166
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.80in - 5.40in - 0.60in - 0.40lb
  • EAN: 9781949467864
  • Categories: • Short Stories (single author)• Asian American & Pacific Islander• Cultural Heritage

About the Author

May-lee Chai is the author of the American Book Award-winning story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants and ten other books. Her prize-winning short prose has been published widely, including in the New England Review, Missouri Review, Seventeen, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The recipient of an NEA fellowship in prose, Chai is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

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Book Cover for: Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories, May-Lee Chai
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What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Nina de Gramont
Nina de Gramont
2 years

Nina de Gramont is an author.

Stop EVERYTHING and read these gorgeous stories by May-lee Chai! @mayleechai

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Mentioner image for: May-lee Chai 翟梅莉
May-lee Chai 翟梅莉
@mayleechai
2 years

May-lee Chai is an author.

Wow! Just saw that @BookRiot praised TOMORROW IN SHANGHAI as a "must-read short story collection" along with these authors I so admire, including Andrea Barrett, @Morgan_J_Talty , Ling Ma, and Janelle Monáe! https://t.co/Z7fe3h2tGv

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Mentioner image for: NYPL Recommends
NYPL Recommends
@NYPLRecommends
2 years

Looking for your next read? You're in the right place. Personalized recs, alternating Wednesdays and Thursdays and always here: https://t.co/WMEobU4K8g

@BleakAven How about Tomorrow in Shanghai by May-Lee Chai, Hao by Chun Ye, or I Will Die in a Foreign Land by Kalani Pickhart, which is a novel, but really feels like interconnected short stories, set in Ukraine.

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Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"This slim but wide-ranging work is a great achievement."--STARRED Review, Publishers Weekly

"Chai bears cleareyed witness, with righteous anger swirling beneath her pellucid prose."--Kirkus

"May-lee Chai's abundant gifts as a writer are on full display in this collection. In these stories we find people displaced, people who find themselves, by choice or by accident, navigating foreign lands and strange worlds, looking for the way home. With invention and nuance, Chai creates a sense of heightened awareness, of distance, both physical and emotional. Illuminating, heartbreaking, and yet also very funny, Tomorrow in Shanghai is a rewarding and entertaining read."--Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of Interior Chinatown

"There's a beautiful directness in these stories that is itself a kind of moral courage. This collection is full of heartbreak and love, unbearable yearning and fulfillment, and, over and over again, the pain of not being seen--and in May-lee Chai's sentences, there is wondrous seeing. Tomorrow in Shanghai is a superb and powerfully affecting collection."--Clare Beams, Bard Fiction Prize-winning author of We Show What We Have Learned and The Illness Lesson

"Tomorrow in Shanghai by May-lee Chai is an insightful, empathetic collection with a vast and imaginative range. These stories and narrators across the Chinese diaspora examine the complexity of familial relationships, probe our most formative experiences and memories, and ask what it means to belong."--K-Ming Chang, Bestiary

"Chai plunges into the caverns of the human experience and untaps a rich bounty. Tomorrow in Shanghai is a tribute not only to Chinese immigrants but to anyone who has seen the American dream come up short."--Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of A Kind of Freedom (longlisted for the National Book Award) and The Revisioners (winner of the NAACP Image Award)

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