Those familiar with my reading tastes have probably heard me say this way too many times: I'm not usually a huge fan of short story collections because I don't like the "incomplete" nature of the format, as I always feel like I'm left hanging somehow, plus I oftentimes don't get the chance to connect to the characters the way I would in a full length novel. Even though it can be a "hit or miss" reading experience for me, I will still pick up a short story collection if the themes or subject matter sound interesting enough to me – especially since, at least recently, I've encountered "hits" more than "misses" in the ones I've decided to try. Such is the case with Jack Wang's debut short story collectionWe Two Alone, which I finished over the course of a busy weekend. This well-written collection consists of seven stories, each of which features a Chinese protagonist from different walks of life, but with the common experience of having to navigate the world as immigrants.
Over the years, I've read plenty of stories about the Chinese immigrant experience, but this particular collection stood out in several ways. First was the setting of each story, which spanned not only continents but also decades -- starting in the 1920s and spanning to the modern day, each story takes place in a different part of the world: Canada, China, Austria, South Africa, UK, and 2 states in the U.S. (Florida and New York). Second was the characters, all of whom hailed from different backgrounds (from the poor, uneducated, disenfranchised, to the wealthy and privileged, to the middle class) and professions (doctor, actor, hockey player, student, teacher, etc.). Not only that, each story was also told from a different life perspective -- ranging from an orphaned teenager struggling with identity and acceptance, to a mixed race couple navigating the complexities of an unconventional relationship, to a middle class family experiencing unexpected hurdles when buying a house, to an innocent child inadvertently witnessing the atrocities of war, to an itinerant actor endlessly trying to figure out his life while yearning to reunite with his ex-wife, etc.
Taken together, this is a collection that truly does highlight the diversity of the Chinese diaspora, yet at the same time, it also infers that there is a certain universality to the immigrant experience in terms of discrimination, bias, and racial prejudice that so many of us can relate to, regardless of whether we are from the same cultural or socio-economic background. In this regard, I was actually able to resonate with some aspect of every single story, which is a rare occurrence for me with short story collections (and especially with a collection as diverse as this one). With that said though, this also made the feeling of disappointment greater for me knowing that I was only getting a snippet of each character's story and would be left to ponder their fate on my own. This is one of the things with short story collections (specifically the ones with no inter-connected characters) that I can't stand – the feeling of being left hanging. With whatever story I read, I need to have closure – whether good, bad, or ambiguous, doesn't matter as long I don't feel like something's missing or the story is incomplete. But of course, that's just me -- aside from the lack of closure issue (which is a common feature of most short stories and definitely not exclusive to this book), I still enjoyed this collection immensely and absolutely recommend it. Prior to reading this collection, I had actually never heard of this author before, but I'm happy to have discovered his work and look forward to reading more from him in the future.
Received ARC from HarperVia publishers via Edelweiss.
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