Seven intriguing stories compose Taiwanese American author and screenwriter Elaine Hsieh Chou's first collection after her lauded debut novel, Disorientation. She opens with "Carrot Legs," about a precocious 13-year-old Taiwanese American visiting her grandparents in Taipei. She's arrived solo this time and her 16-year-old cousin, LaLa, is assigned "to take care of [her] while [she's] here." Sharing a bedroom together encourages sharing and secrets--even plans for violence against a meddling auntie--until a new boyfriend drives the girls apart. A potential love interest also causes a disturbing rift in "You Put a Rabbit on Me," featuring a pair of meta-doppelgängers. "I had primarily come to Paris to find the real me," American Elaine explains, arriving in France to work as an au pair. She meets her exact mirror, French Elaine, in a grocery store's yogurt aisle. An inseparable bond is inevitable--one that's at first devoted but turns punishing when a dating app match upsets their surreal pairing.
In two stories spotlighting parent/child relationships, Chou's characters, either child or parent, exhibit disturbing behaviors excused under the guise of filial or parental duty. In "Happy Endings," a DNA researcher claims his mother's frailty as his reason to eschew a family of his own, instead turning to "professional, uncomplicated relief" that grows more heinously brutal. In "The Dollhouse," a mother uses the figures in her nine-year-old daughter's toy dollhouse to reveal her troubled past as a carer to real-life "dolls," pregnant immigrant women paying exorbitant fees to birth babies with birthright citizenship. Chou sets the collection's novella closing, "Casualties of Art," in a writing residency, capturing pivotal moments of a tumultuous affair between an as-yet unpublished Korean Chinese author, David, and an adopted Korean American artist, Sophia, visiting her white writer husband. Their brief relationship provides David plenty of fodder for a story he plans to submit to a prestigious contest.
While deftly exploring diverse genres--coming-of-age, speculative, contemporary realism, auto- and meta-fiction--Chou convincingly interrogates and exposes unsettling relationships between family members, lovers, and former strangers. Beyond her multi-layered narratives (race, privilege, sexism, and identity are all contained here), she also notably, slyly inserts a sense of unreliability in her storytelling. Meanwhile, her novella offers a non-ending in five potential variations, adding numerous possibilities but never easy clarity. Yes, fiction is imagined and created, but Chou also manages to shrewdly, impressively deceive. --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: Novelist Elaine Hsieh Chou's intriguing first collection of stories showcases diverse genres, agitated relationships, and--oh, so very cleverly--unreliable narration.