Reading each tale in Diane Williams’s I HEAR YOU’RE RICH: Stories (Soho Press, 111 pp., $20) feels like looking into the deep, expressive eyes of a person who doesn’t speak much: A great deal is left unsaid. Many of the stories, only two to four pages long, cast light on seemingly ordinary moments in the lives of women quietly struggling against forces that are not always clear to them.
In “Oriel?,” a woman considers what to name her unborn child as she begrudgingly serves cake to her in-laws, her mind wandering, not fully present in the room. In the following story, “The Tune,” the narrator connects with a bird, whistling along with him. “He was my creature briefly,” she says. “We didn’t even vary the volume.” Though the stories themselves give no hint that these two narrators are one and the same, the reticence of the first and the non-human companion of the second suggest they could be.
Then again, this essential loneliness unites all of Williams’s protagonists (including one fictional Diane Williams in “A Slew of Attractions”). As the attractive couple in “Catalpa” sits in the park noting mundanities like a squirrel eating a banana chili, the wife admits to herself that she, like a pigeon deciding to walk rather than fly, “is not in a hurry either — to face the facts of her marriage.” (The reader is left to guess what those facts might be.) Exhausted by her friends, the narrator of “Can This Be I?” leaves her own party and wanders into a quiet bar for a drink, wishing she could go all the way to Japan to experience “emptiness” and escape “clutter.” “The Assignment of Fate” follows a narrator on a tour of an opulent Vanderbilt mansion as she silently compares a “plumed fan” in a painting to her own “hand-painted, Chinese fan made of paper and bamboo,” which she has never used.
It can be aggravating to read so many stories that feel opaque and unfinished in succession. But this may be the book’s conceit: We can never know the full story; we can only ever get a glimpse. Layered together, these glimpses result in a haunting feeling, telling us less about the world and far more about the eyes through which we are seeing it.
The linked entries in Yan Ge’s deft English-language debut, ELSEWHERE: Stories (Scribner, 293 pp., $27) explore the power of language across the Chinese diaspora to either bring people together or push them apart.
“Mother Tongue” follows a Chinese writer named Pigeon who befriends a group of poets as she comes into adulthood and loses her mother to cancer. Years later, married and living in London, she reconnects with the poet Patient, who reveals that their mutual (Chinese) friend Vertical planned to raise her daughter entirely in English. Both Pigeon and her British husband, Paul, are bilingual, but when he speaks to her in Chinese, “the Mandarin words sank into my stomach with their heavy vowels,” painful reminders of her dead mother. The story closes with Pigeon’s first words in Chinese, spoken to a white pigeon in whom she recognizes her mother.
Other stories examine the losses inherent in not knowing a language. In “How I Fell in Love With the Well-Documented Life of Alex Whelan,” Xiaohan, or “Claire,” a Chinese immigrant in Dublin, attends a “Foreign Movies No Subtitles” gathering where they watch a heartbreaking film in Japanese, a language she doesn’t know. Afterward she debates the plot with Alex, the man sitting next to her: “‘It seemed the old man was about to die so he arranged a marriage for his daughter,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so,’ he disagreed. ‘I think he liked that hostess woman and the daughter decided to get married so her dad could find his own happiness.’” When she learns of Alex’s suicide the next day, she starts to obsess over his social media. “You are a foreigner in this country,” her mother reminds her. “Don’t be silly, daydreaming about some Prince Charming.”
Drawing these contemporary themes back to ancient origins, the final novella, “Hai,” is a gripping thriller set in the fifth century B.C.E., about a murder and a power struggle among the disciples of Confucius. Like Yan’s earlier characters, the bright-eyed lead disciple Zixia faces marital tension and a corrupt workplace; he is never quite where he wants to be. As a failed academic and palliative care worker says in another story, “We all came here for one thing and ended up with another.”
In LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO: Stories (Tin House, 245 pp., paperback, $17.95), Qian illuminates the lives of young Asian and Asian American women in a modern, globalized, hyper-digital world where the pressure to settle down persists. But Qian’s protagonists resist, meeting strangers online, moving easily between continents and seeking truths where others do not.
The first story, “Chicken. Film. Youth.,” sets the tone for the collection with four 28-year-old friends eating fried chicken at a restaurant in Los Angeles on a rainy night. As the group compares the marriage proposals and wedding invitations and I.P.O.s and Ph.D.s among them, Luna thinks, “What about all our potential? Where had it gone?” Terrified by the prospect of waking up in four years still with her current boyfriend, she makes a choice at the end of the evening that just might free her from the constraints imposed by society.
The book focuses on the ways in which female friendships morph over time, and sometimes fall apart. In the title story, Emi reconnects with a charismatic old friend in Tokyo, but throughout their strange adventure the two never quite regain familiarity. “How to react when you meet one of those figures from your past whom you had once known intimately,” Emi wonders, “but was now a stranger, with years of distance in between?”
The most striking story in the collection is “The Girl With the Double Eyelids,” about Xiao Yun, a high school student who feels pressured to go under the knife in the name of beauty. The surgery not only gives her the titular eye crease associated with Western faces, it also gives her the superhuman ability to see invisible symbols on people’s bodies, including a menacing tongue on the back of a chemistry teacher’s neck. When Xiao Yun discovers the teacher has romantic relationships with students, including a friend she is intensely attracted to, she intervenes, and pays a price.
Throughout the collection, characters come to the harsh realization that the process of growing up does not guarantee maturity. In “Wings and Radio,” Jinyi, a dejected radio host in Chengdu, China, is inspired by a K-pop star to pour her heart out on-air. “When I look at the adults around me, they seem just as uncertain as I am,” she says. “All of us are flailing around, trying to figure out how to find that vague thing, happiness.”
Sindya Bhanoo is the author of “Seeking Fortune Elsewhere: Stories.”
