One of the most exciting things about this collection is its variety of voices and tones, the sense that each new story represents a completely fresh perspective. (That blurb is weird.) The 12 stories are sorted into three sections: 'Family', 'Love', and 'Time and Space'. Billed as being specifically about the Chinese millennial experience, but in fact it's rather broader than that there's nothing about 'unconventional sex lives' or 'fantastic technologies' in here either. Recommended to those who want a fresh, contemporary collection of short stories with a diversity of literary elements and points of view.Ī strong debut collection of short stories. While others in the collection did not resonate as much with me – the stories that felt more experimental and the ones that did not have a strong grounding within one or two characters’ emotional experiences – I still appreciated the variety of perspectives in Home Remedies. This collection as a whole feels current and well-poised to make an impact in our changing society, while still relevant to long-drawn themes of family and connection and wanting to belong. She shows the emotional consequences of these cultural misunderstandings, as well as the love that remains between family and friends despite these differences. Again, I loved when Wang wrote about real relationships and how parent abandonment, mismatch between Chinese culture and mainstream American culture, and other nuanced topics affected these relationships. Other standouts include “ Fuerdai to the Max,” about second-generation rich Chinese youth who face few consequences for their actions until they do, “Algorithmic Problem-Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships,” about a father who tries to calculate an equation to make sense of his daughter who grew up in a culture different from his own, and “Future Cat,” about a woman who experiments with time as she settles into a boring marriage while longing for a past romantic flame. I feel like “Vaulting the Sea” represents what Wang does best in the strongest stories in this collection: capturing real emotions and relationships affected by the complex intersection of our own social identities and the cultures we leave or still reside within. You can literally imagine me whisper-screaming “oh my gosh, Taoyu, I love you!” in an emotional frenzy as I flipped the pages of this oh-so-quiet-yet-compelling short story. With beautiful, subtle prose Wang writes about Taoyu’s coming of age of his own queer identity as well as his relationship with his mother. This story focuses on Taoyu and his best friend Hai, a pair of synchronized divers poised for success at the Beijing Olympics. This is going to be a lop-sided review because I have to first focus on my favorite story from this collection, “Vaulting the Sea.” “Vaulting the Sea” made my poor gay heart break and heal and ache as I cheered for its queer protagonist Taoyu.

A gorgeous collection of short stories that centers the Chinese millennial experience and spans topics like immigration, family, romance, and how where we come from affects how we relate to others.

Home remedies