Stretching from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin's piercing and melodious debut captures the spirit of China's One-Child Generation as its characters navigate homes and cultures, hopes and contradictions, survival and resistance. These frank, tender, and playful stories offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today.
The collection begins with "Scenes from Childhood," in which a lonely, elderly woman in a dystopian reality remembers her grandfather's village. In "Magic, or Something Less Assuring," a politically divided couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco. "You Won't Read This in the News" features four migrant workers during one night of petty theft and connection. In "Tough Egg," a filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood. Other stories portray a photographer reuniting with her first love in Beijing; the historic White Paper protests that ended the zero-COVID policy; and generations into the future, a newly instated Memory Museum where two sensory architects share their vision for a utopian world.
With daring political and creative commitment, The Memory Museum brims with joy even as Lin exposes the knife's edge between powerlessness and agency, pain and intimacy, our memories and our futures.
About the Author :
M Lin is a Chinese writer living in the US. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023, and her nonfiction can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
Review :
"The Memory Museum is a book to get very excited about. With gumption and pizzazz M Lin can seemingly take any form, genre, or style and make it do whatever she wants, always something unexpected. But under all the technical brilliance are the timeless literary subjects: love, death, money, family, and mind-blowing sex with some random guy."--Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
"Deeply felt and grounded in an intimate acquaintance with contemporary China, these wide-ranging stories portray villagers, protesters, artists, and petty thieves alike with empathy and grace. Nothing is easy for them, and the questions they raise are not easy for us. What an absorbing, probing debut! Wonderful."--Gish Jen, author of Bad Bad Girl
"These stories are a treasure--moving, kaleidoscopic, ingenious. The Memory Museum marks the arrival of a bold and brilliant voice."--Madeleine Thien, author of The Book of Records
"A book of astonishing vitality and vision, The Memory Museum encourages us to ask: What is and what ought to be the relationship between self and society?"--Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief
"In nine stories that resist easy conclusions, M Lin builds worlds bursting with all the complexities that humans hold--longing, hunger of all sorts, and the joys that make impossible any true shunning of the grief we must feel for having loved and lived. In exacting prose, Lin illuminates how memory is the ghost we hold inside ourselves, proving it's not the places we inhabit that are haunted, but the people, our very bodies, and how fortunate we are, whether experiencing heaven or hell, to have ever existed at all."--Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat
"M Lin's brave and oh-so-imaginative stories unfold with cinematic clarity. In these pages is the particular flavor of loss that is the cost of migration--whether from the village to the city, or from China to the West (and back); the displacement of having multiple identities and languages; the heartbreak of time and the blade vs. comfort of nostalgia. I enjoyed living in the vibrant worlds of Lin's prose and her wise meditations on memory, art, resistance, class, and music!"--'Pemi Aguda, author of Ghostroots
