Vanessa Hua’s debut collection follows people within the machinery of migration, family expectation and reinvention.

Her stories follow children translating themselves for parents, parents attempting to understand children remade by another country, and characters discovering that belonging often requires a certain amount of performance. The stories move between the United States and Asia, through immigrant families, students, workers and travellers whose lives are shaped by several cultures at once without being neatly claimed by any of them.

Hua writes with a journalist’s eye for social detail but avoids turning her characters into case studies; the collection is interested in contradiction, especially the collision between private desire and the identities other people expect us to inhabit. It later became a New York Times Editors’ Choice and received the Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature.

A sharp, lively collection for readers interested in contemporary Asian American fiction, migration, family, assimilation and the stranger forms of deception involved in becoming someone elsewhere.

Willow Books, a division of Aquarius Press, 2016. Paperback. First edition of the original Willow Books publication. Cover shows very light shelf wear and minor rubbing to edges/corners; internally clean and bright with no obvious markings. Binding firm. Very good condition.