A dozen narrators perform this collection of stories about Chinese 20-somethings who are navigating the road to adulthood. All the narrators underscore the central drama of the stories, such as the clash of generations, the difficulties and joys of immigration, and the complexities of friendship. The characters are primarily the children of immigrants, university students abroad, or young adults, rich or poor, who are trying to find a future in today’s China. Standout performances are Annie Q’s smooth, soft portrayal of a woman who unwittingly finds social media fame in Paris, David Shih’s interpretation of the emotional torment of a young, gay athlete who is in love with his heterosexual diving partner, and James Chen’s characterizations of a factory manager who negotiates a marriage of convenience to gain a new country and wealth. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Home Remedies: Stories
Narrated by Catherine Ho, Tim Chiou, Feodor Chin, Various Narrators
Xuan Juliana WangUnabridged — 6 hours, 29 minutes
Home Remedies: Stories
Narrated by Catherine Ho, Tim Chiou, Feodor Chin, Various Narrators
Xuan Juliana WangUnabridged — 6 hours, 29 minutes
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Overview
“An urgent and necessary literary voice.”-Alexander Chee,*Electric Literature***
“Tough, luminous stories.”-The New York Times Book Review*
“Spectacular.”-Vogue
Xuan Juliana Wang's*remarkable debut introduces*us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. From fuerdai (second-generation rich kids) to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, her dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions.
*
In stories of love, family, and friendship, here are the voices, faces and stories of a new generation never before captured between the pages in fiction. What sets them apart is Juliana Wang's surprising imagination, able to capture the innermost thoughts of her characters with astonishing empathy, as well as the contradictions of the modern immigrant experience in a way that feels almost universal. Home Remedies is, in the words of Alexander Chee, “the arrival of an urgent and necessary literary voice we've been needing, waiting for maybe, without knowing.”
*
Praise for Home Remedies
“A radiant new talent.”-Lauren Groff
*
“These dazzling stories interrogate the fractures, collisions and glorious new alloys of what it means to be a Chinese millennial.”-Adam Johnson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning*The Orphan Master's Son
“Home Remedies*doesn't read like a first collection; like Jhumpa Lahiri's*Interpreter of Maladies, the twelve stories here announce the arrival of an exciting, electric new voice.”-Financial Times
“Stylistically ambitious in a way rarely seen in prose fiction . . . Writing like this will never stop enlightening us. [Wang's] voice comes to us from the edge of a new world.”-Los Angeles Review of Books
Editorial Reviews
03/04/2019
Wang’s formidable imagination is on full display in this wide-ranging debut collection about modern Chinese youth. Her characters include artistic and aimless 20-year-olds eking out a living shooting subversive music videos for bands in Beijing (“Days of Being Mild”); a Chinese-American girl in Paris, who finds her life changed when she begins wearing a dead girl’s clothes (“Echo of the Moment”); and a struggling writer who receives a mysterious gadget in the mail that ages whatever she puts into it, whether it’s avocadoes, wine, or her cat (“Future Cat”). Wang plays with form as well, as in “Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments,” written as a catalogue of such ailments as “Inappropriate Feelings” and “Bilingual Heartache,” or “Algorithm Problem Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships,” which allows a computer science–minded Chinese immigrant father to apply his discipline’s techniques to his relationship with his second-generation Chinese-American daughter. One of the best stories in the collection is “Vaulting the Sea,” in which Taoyu, an Olympic hopeful synchronized diver, struggles with complicated feelings for his partner Hai against a greater backdrop of sacrifice, ambition, and tragedy. Though some of the stories’ narrative momentum can’t match the consistently excellent characters, nonetheless Wang proves herself a promising writer with a delightfully playful voice and an uncanny ability to evoke empathy, nostalgia, and wonder. (May)
An Elle Best Spring Books of 2019
"Remarkable...Wang captures the strivings and uncertainty of Chinese youth establishing themselves in America and beyond...[A] deft, striking debut." —New York Observer, Spring 2019 Must-Read Books
"Artful, funny, generous and empathetic… a radiant new talent." —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
"These dazzling stories interrogate the fractures, collisions and glorious new alloys of what it means to be a Chinese Millennial. Xuan Juliana Wang has the dark soul of an old poet’s inkwell, the deep knowing of an ancient remedy, and linguistic incandescence of a megacity skyline." —Adam Johnson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Orphan Master's Son
“Vast in scope and ridiculously accomplished, Home Remedies captures the rapidity and dislocation of our modern world. Underneath it all is a tender yearning for belonging, self-possession and connection. Xuan Juliana Wang is singing an incredibly complex song of hybridity and heart.” —Justin Torres, author of We, the Animals
"With style, verve and grace, Wang’s stories surprise and challenge in wonderful ways." — Weike Wang, author of Chemistry
"Tasty little bits of perfection. One of the great debuts of the year." —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
‘Excellent… Wang boldly explores what it means to be a Chinese millennial and seamlessly captures the longing of an emerging generation.’ —Booklist
'Wang’s formidable imagination is on full display in this wide-ranging debut collection about modern Chinese youth. Wang proves herself a promising writer with a delightfully playful voice and an uncanny ability to evoke empathy, nostalgia, and wonder.' —Publisher's Weekly
“Wang's stories are spare and haunting, with endings that leave characters just as unsettled as their beginnings… it fully embraces Wang's love of the uncanny as a way to parse generational misunderstanding or the surreality of contemporary life. A sharp and poignant collection.” —Kirkus
A dozen narrators perform this collection of stories about Chinese 20-somethings who are navigating the road to adulthood. All the narrators underscore the central drama of the stories, such as the clash of generations, the difficulties and joys of immigration, and the complexities of friendship. The characters are primarily the children of immigrants, university students abroad, or young adults, rich or poor, who are trying to find a future in today’s China. Standout performances are Annie Q’s smooth, soft portrayal of a woman who unwittingly finds social media fame in Paris, David Shih’s interpretation of the emotional torment of a young, gay athlete who is in love with his heterosexual diving partner, and James Chen’s characterizations of a factory manager who negotiates a marriage of convenience to gain a new country and wealth. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
2019-03-03
In her debut, Wang examines the difficulties of immigration as sources of pain, connection, and confusion between friends, family, and would-be lovers.
Wang's narrators come from all walks of life, from the poorest factory towns of rural Henan to the richest high-rises of Beijing. Yet they all struggle with feelings of alienation and distance from the people they should love the most—a state of unbelonging and disconnection spurred by migration. In "Mott Street in July," overworked immigrant parents drift away from their three children, leaving them to survive on their own in New York's Chinatown. In "Fuerdai to the Max," a spoiled rich kid who counts himself one of the "fuerdai," or "second-generation rich," tries to outrun the consequences of a brutal assault designed to keep the powers of his social circle intact. "Why should I care?" he asks himself, defensively. "Nobody cared what I did. I never had anybody to answer to." Wang's stories are spare and haunting, with endings that leave characters just as unsettled as their beginnings. Only occasionally do they turn tender, as in the exquisite "Vaulting the Sea," in which an Olympic hopeful decides to end his career after realizing his diving partner will never love him back. The collection is strongest when it fully embraces Wang's love of the uncanny as a way to parse generational misunderstanding or the surreality of contemporary life. "Echo of the Moment" offers a satisfying contemporary riff on the Narcissus myth and digital culture. Echo, a young Chinese-American student living in Paris, steals the couture from a suicide's apartment only to find that the clothes transform her into a viral sensation online—and that they might drive her to the same fate. And "The Art of Straying Off Course" moves in a compressed narrative time reminiscent of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, allowing an old woman—on her way to vacation in space—the opportunity to examine her early choices in life and love with the tender gaze of experience. "Behind me, through the window, all the places I am trying to leave behind," she thinks. "All that wonderful chaos, horizontal, never-ending."
A sharp and poignant collection.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169270181 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 05/14/2019 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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