The Chinese diaspora is dispersed across continents and decades in Jack Wang's magnificent debut, We Two Alone (selected as one of the CBC's 2020 Best Canadian Fiction and Quill & Quire's 2020 Books of the Year). Wang's seven-story collection traverses North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, pausing at pivotal moments over a century of history, each presented through a peripatetic Chinese lens.
Wang's opening story, "The Valkyries," features a Vancouver orphan teen, indentured to an opium-addicted laundry owner, who starts playing women's hockey after the men's team rejects him for being Chinese. In "The Night of Broken Glass," a Chinese diplomat family posted in Vienna is witness to Kristallnacht and the beginnings of its horrific aftermath. Wang's grandmother inspired "The Nature of Things," about a Canadian couple who move to Shanghai, only to be swept up in the exodus as the Japanese invade the city in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. A medical student in South Africa is driven by apartheid to move elsewhere in "Everything in Between." Love--and Oxford degrees--can't bridge the divide for a wealthy Londoner and Chinese immigrants' son in "Belsize Park." In "Allhallows," a Chinese Canadian hockey player, demoted to a Florida team, takes his sons trick-or-treating one day late. And the titular "We Two Alone" intimately reveals the implosion of a 20-year marriage between two actors.
Wang's protagonists are ethnically Chinese, but their lives--either by birth or circumstances--happen beyond national borders, as they adapt (or not), plant (or not), merely survive and sometimes thrive around the world. Global citizen Wang, a Vancouver transplant teaching at Ithaca College, writes with masterful assurance, eschewing labels, and creating exquisite gems of universal empathy. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon