About the Book
The twelve stories in Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut collection capture the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth. A generation for whom the Cultural Revolution is a distant memory, WeChat is king and life glitters with the possibility of love, travel, technology, and, above all, new identities.
Whether at home or abroad, her stories catch their characters at the threshold of bold and uncertain futures, navigating between their cultural heritage and the chaos of contemporary life. In a crowded apartment on Mott Street, an immigrant family raises its first real Americans. At the Beijing Olympics, a pair of synchronized divers stand poised at the edge of success and self-discovery. And on a snowless New York evening, a father creates an algorithm to troubleshoot the problem of raising a daughter across an ever-widening gulf of cultures and generations.
From fuerdai ('second-generation-rich' kids) and livestream stars to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, these stories upend the well-worn path of the immigrant experience to reveal a new face of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are and who they will one day become, in a world as vast and various as their ambitions.
In dexterous, electric prose, Xuan Juliana Wang's stories reveal a dazzling imagination and announce the arrival of a beguiling new voice in American fiction.
About the Author :
Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China but after age seven, did most of her growing up in Los Angeles. Her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Narrative, Gigantic, The Brooklyn Rail and has been included in The Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016. Juliana has a MFA from Columbia University, was a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Cite des Arts International, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is a fiction editor at Fence, and has taught writing for Stanford University Continuing Studies and the Summer Literary Seminars in Georgia.
Review :
Striking, soulful and ablaze with promise.
Remarkable...Wang captures the strivings and uncertainty of Chinese youth establishing themselves in America and beyond...[A] deft, striking debut.
The sixteen stories in Home Remedies are so artful, funny, generous and empathetic that they'll linger in readers for weeks after you finish the book. Xuan Juliana Wang is a radiant new talent.
In just 12 stories, Wang manages to whip up the portrait of a generation...Proving herself to be an
incredible new talent and giving voice Chinese millennials, this is a short story collection you need to read this summer.
The dozen stories in this dazzling and unclassifiable collection 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. Trust these stories to show you the way.
With style, verve and grace, Wang brings a new perspective to stories about family and community. Both modern and innovative, her stories surprise and challenge in wonderful, wonderful ways.
Tasty little bits of perfection. One of the great debuts of the year.
The American dream goes global in Xuan Juliana Wang's spectacular debut.... Moving from lower Manhattan to mainland China, the dozen tales in the collection are peopled by immigrants in limbo and Asian millennials riding high on WeChat and rock'n'roll.... Sublimely captivating.
Endearing characters with bizarre fixations fill Wang's superb debut collection, a perfect book to dip into this summer.... Wang's striking characters are fresh, clever, and shouldn't be missed.
Bright
Studded with poetic lines... Home Remedies is full of soulful, Beijing-based coming-of-age stories.
Clever and strange, these stories move from America to China and back again, with themes of identity, privilege and race.
Elements of the surreal and the elegiac mixed in with the comedy and social satire. A memorable collection.
An exciting, electric new voice... Sublime.
A striking demonstration of Wang's versatile storytelling gifts, presenting a range of characters, perspectives, and formal choices that prove she has the tools to write a story in whatever way it needs to be written. Home Remedies is filled with characters facing boundaries to be crossed: cultural, familial, economic, political. The magic of these stories radiates from the friction created as characters enter new worlds and try, imperfectly, to make a home for themselves.
Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth... 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 generationnever 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.
