Tomorrow in Shanghai - Stories

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.

List of contents

Table of Contents

• Tomorrow in Shanghai
  
• Life on Mars
  
• Monkey King of Sichuan
  
• Hong's Mother
  
• White Rabbits
  
• Jia
  
• Slow Train to Beijing
  
• The Nanny
  

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.

Summary

In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai explores a complex blend of cultures spanning China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and in the world at large—revealing the complex schisms in the globalized world. Her stories illuminate the divides between rural and urban, male and female, rich and poor, and those in-between—always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.

Foreword

• BookSparks/Crystal Patriarche hired for publicity
• Tour in California and on East Coast 
  
• SIBA and regional bookseller catalog ads 
• Galleys available 
• Social media, pitches to national media, and other online promotion 
• Website: may-leechai.com
  

Additional text

“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) 

Product details

• Authors: May-Lee Chai
• Publisher: Blair John F Publications
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 30.08.2022, delayed
• EAN: 9781949467864
• ISBN: 978-1-949467-86-4
• No. of pages: 166
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Cultural Heritage, FICTION / Asian American