Description
Set against the panoramic backdrop of modern-day Hong Kong, a debut anthology of short fiction captures the colorful lives of the inhabitants of this culturally diverse city, from a Chinese girl and her American teacher searching for the ghost of her suicidal mother, a masseur reliving the trauma of the Cultural Revolution, and a businessman who falls in love with a bar hostess. Reader's Guide available. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
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The characters in Jess Row’s remarkable fiction inhabit “a city that can be like a mirage, hovering above the ground: skyscrapers built on mountainsides, islands swallowed in fog for days.” This is Hong Kong, where a Chinese girl and her American teacher explore the “blindness” of bats in an effort to locate the ghost of her suicidal mother; an American graduate student provokes a masseur into reliving the traumatic experience of the Cultural Revolution; a businessman falls in love with a prim bar hostess across the border, in Shenzhen, and finds himself helpless to dissolve the boundaries between them; a stock analyst obsessed with work drives her husband to attend a Zen retreat, where he must come to terms with his failing marriage.Scrupulously imagined and psychologically penetrating, these seven stories shed light on the many nuances of race, sex, religion, and culture in this most mysterious of cities, even as they illuminate the most universal of human experiences.From the Hardcover edition.
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