Home remedies Stories

Review by New York Times Review

HOME REMEDIES ? these tough, luminous stories about destiny, fealty, belonging and heartbreak, every good thing comes at a price. Each character gets something he or she wants, but only by sacrificing something he or she needs. "Vaulting the Sea" charts the bond between two boys whose bodies and futures are claimed and entwined by the state: "Once they were assigned as each other's partner in synchronized diving, every moment of their lives was the same." The opening image - "in the air, they were one body reflected in a mirror" - haunts us as the story unfolds and we learn what it's like to crave a body you already share, and might never escape. As the boys grow up, the power balance shifts irreparably, one wanting to remove himself entirely from the other's life, in order "to leave a wound that would ache. That was the only way they could be equals." Wang unpacks unwieldy relationships with a light touch, slicing cleanly through the intricacies to render them instantly familiar. Wang's writing is sensory, cinematic and fluid. In "Days of Being Mild," an affluent, talentless drifter and his broke and talented friends shoot a music video during his last days in Beijing, from where he will soon emigrate to Louisiana to manage his father's oil fields. Itself resembling a music video, the story begins in a speeding car and accelerates through shots of the friends aimlessly floating in and out of love (one watches his ex kiss her new girlfriend "as if he's witnessing an eclipse"), interspersed with atmospheric stills of the city ("the misty mournful day is illuminated by the pollution that makes Beijing's light pop, extending the slow orange days"). The closing scene is overlaid with lyrics from the music video they just shot, as the narrator collects his L-l investment visa from the American Embassy ("secretly building the bridge on which to leave them") and recalls with tenderness the time before his father made his money, when the ferry his family rode to the shops capsized, describing the ensuing chaos as "those brief moments of ecstasy."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

Something amazing had to happen . . . something incredible had to come true. In Wang's excellent debut collection of 12 short stories, her characters all share the hope of becoming something extraordinary. In "White Tiger of the West," a young boy wishes to become someone great, but, despite his self-proclaimed title of spiritual Grandmaster Tutu and thorough studies of qi, he cannot escape his ordinariness. The group of Chinese millennials in "Days of Being Mild" yearn to become respected artists and filmmakers. Their greatest desire is not to make money, but to prove that they are different from the generations before them. In "For Our Children," Xiao Gang is given a chance to avoid his destiny of becoming a farmer just like his ancestors before him, but a green card, a job, and a rich new life in California come with a price: marry an older woman with Down syndrome. In these stories and others, Wang boldly explores what it means to be a Chinese millennial and seamlessly captures the longing of an emerging generation.--Emily Park Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Wang's formidable imagination is on full display in this wide-ranging debut collection about modern Chinese youth. Her characters include artistic and aimless 20-year-olds eking out a living shooting subversive music videos for bands in Beijing ("Days of Being Mild"); a Chinese-American girl in Paris, who finds her life changed when she begins wearing a dead girl's clothes ("Echo of the Moment"); and a struggling writer who receives a mysterious gadget in the mail that ages whatever she puts into it, whether it's avocadoes, wine, or her cat ("Future Cat"). Wang plays with form as well, as in "Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments," written as a catalogue of such ailments as "Inappropriate Feelings" and "Bilingual Heartache," or "Algorithm Problem Solving for Father-Daughter Relationships," which allows a computer science-minded Chinese immigrant father to apply his discipline's techniques to his relationship with his second-generation Chinese-American daughter. One of the best stories in the collection is "Vaulting the Sea," in which Taoyu, an Olympic hopeful synchronized diver, struggles with complicated feelings for his partner Hai against a greater backdrop of sacrifice, ambition, and tragedy. Though some of the stories' narrative momentum can't match the consistently excellent characters, nonetheless Wang proves herself a promising writer with a delightfully playful voice and an uncanny ability to evoke empathy, nostalgia, and wonder. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In her debut, Wang examines the difficulties of immigration as sources of pain, connection, and confusion between friends, family, and would-be lovers.Wang's narrators come from all walks of life, from the poorest factory towns of rural Henan to the richest high-rises of Beijing. Yet they all struggle with feelings of alienation and distance from the people they should love the mosta state of unbelonging and disconnection spurred by migration. In "Mott Street in July," overworked immigrant parents drift away from their three children, leaving them to survive on their own in New York's Chinatown. In "Fuerdai to the Max," a spoiled rich kid who counts himself one of the "fuerdai," or "second-generation rich," tries to outrun the consequences of a brutal assault designed to keep the powers of his social circle intact. "Why should I care?" he asks himself, defensively. "Nobody cared what I did. I never had anybody to answer to." Wang's stories are spare and haunting, with endings that leave characters just as unsettled as their beginnings. Only occasionally do they turn tender, as in the exquisite "Vaulting the Sea," in which an Olympic hopeful decides to end his career after realizing his diving partner will never love him back. The collection is strongest when it fully embraces Wang's love of the uncanny as a way to parse generational misunderstanding or the surreality of contemporary life. "Echo of the Moment" offers a satisfying contemporary riff on the Narcissus myth and digital culture. Echo, a young Chinese-American student living in Paris, steals the couture from a suicide's apartment only to find that the clothes transform her into a viral sensation onlineand that they might drive her to the same fate. And "The Art of Straying Off Course" moves in a compressed narrative time reminiscent of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, allowing an old womanon her way to vacation in spacethe opportunity to examine her early choices in life and love with the tender gaze of experience. "Behind me, through the window, all the places I am trying to leave behind," she thinks. "All that wonderful chaos, horizontal, never-ending." A sharp and poignant collection. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Home Remedies for Non-Life-Threatening Ailments   Boredom (Born from general confusion stemming from lack of clear direction/complete misunderstanding of life's purpose.)   Stay indoors, in a room with bad lighting but many make­shift ashtrays. Arrange and rearrange your comforter into var­ious malleable structures. Stand back and give names to the newly birthed forms. Now it is a manatee. Now it is Abraham Lincoln's headless body. Now it is a giant nose. Applaud your­self for your mastery, for now you can be fairly certain of the potential you possess as a visual artist.   Write a letter to the boy named Bunny whom you met on a train in Croatia. The one who spoke to trees and set his watch to random hours as his way of time traveling; write to him that you hope he is still alive and insane. Tell him you are glad you're not him and even more glad he's no longer following you around, talking about modernism.   Grief (Not your own grief, but your father's grief, after your fourteen-year-old dog dies. He calls often, sobbing into the receiver. Even though he's a fifty-five-year-old man who should know that a blind asthmatic basset hound was not going to live forever. Grief that hardens when you realize that life has gradually become very difficult for your father, and you're at a loss as to how to comfort him. There are many ways of living, places to hang hopes and direct love, and it's quite obvious to you that a very old dog was probably not a good place to hang his. So it's specifically that kind of grief.)   Let his phone calls ring and ring. Delete voice messages ro­botically, holding the phone away from your ear. If your heart is the fruit from which the nectar of comforting words could be squeezed, that fruit is dry. The dregs could be called mockery. They would sting him bitterly.   It is better to focus on a problem you can help him solve. How about those giant squirrels that have taken over his back­yard? Eating the grass bald in patches, like alien spaceship land­ings. Order poison that he couldn't use when he had a dog around. When all the squirrels are dead, the guilt that both of you will share is sure to keep him from calling you for at least two weeks.   Inappropriate Feelings (Toward married contemporary British drama professors.)   Go to his office hours religiously, bringing in new opinions on plays he'd recommended. Show him the plays you've writ­ten inspired by the plays he's asked you to read. Fiddle with the framed photos on his desk as you talk about your family, his hometown, your boyfriend, and his wife. Laugh a lot. Babysit his three-year-old daughter, Elaine, and while she's asleep, go to his room and smell his shirts.   Agree to go to dinner with him downtown, tell him things about your father you've never told anyone else. You will begin to feel queasy when you realize this is the first time you've ever been alone with him outside of school. When he asks you up to his studio loft to show you his sculptures, say "Cool! Defi­nitely!" with eyebrows arched. When he goes to stroke your hair, act surprised, say something antiquated like "Oh my!"   Take his clothes off while making out with him on his couch. Make mental notes of the peculiarity of his needy old-man lips, his loose old-man skin, and his strange rubbery old-man hard-on. Something will happen right then that'll make him seem less a sexy, gentle intellectual and more just like the guy who "hey hey heys" at you outside the bodega. Your inap­propriate feelings will then be dissolved into a satisfied curios­ity and now you can pull back, walk out of the apartment, and leave him naked, bewildered, gasping.   Self-Doubt (In your abilities as a playwright stemming from Inappropriate Feelings toward married contemporary British drama professors.)   Switch your major to archaeology, to criminology, to li­brary science. Take a semester off to work at a florist across town that specializes in enormous bouquets and fountains.   Write a play about a large, wrinkly alien who terrorizes Los Angeles.   Fear of Flying (Because every time you fly, you land somewhere new and you have to make new friends.)   Leave something you love in every city you've lived in. A record player in Shanghai, a kitten in Seattle, your best dresses hanging in a closet in Paris. That way you'll always have a rea­son to retrace your steps back to old friends. So it means you won't have to stay away forever. Learn to enjoy being alone, appreciate the silence of dinners where an entire roast duck can be gnawed away, cartilage and all, without conversational in­terruption. You are free and oh-so-mysterious. Think: Friends, who needs friends?   Bilingual Heartache (From someone breaking your heart in a foreign lan­guage. It is like regular heartache but somehow it's painful in a creative, new way.)   Pray that a painful cold sore appears on your face so that you can instead wallow in self-pity.   Self-Pity (A by-product of chronic dissatisfaction with your wide, uninter­esting face.)   Get your nails done by a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl who probably weighs about as much as one of your thighs. After she puts your hands in a bowl of smelly water, she rubs lo­tion into your fingers. She looks up at your face and says, "Your hands are so white and soft, you never do any housework, do you?"   Open your mouth to protest, as if she were your mother, but then agree; she guessed correctly. Nod. Lower your head.   Dwelling on the Past (You remember seeing your parents waltzing in the living room of the first house you lived in. You think about your father on his knees like a wounded animal, bent over the newspaper looking for work. You hear the echoes of your mother sobbing in the shower on your way to elementary school. These memories become a fable, entitled "The Legend of Mom and Dad," and it is tied to you like a cloud-shaped balloon above your head.)   Begin researching random things of interest. The history of Jamaica, for example, and the tragic disappearance of indig­enous people is a good place to start. Start a blog about Jamaica and Jamaican cuisine. Establish a huge Internet presence.   Insomnia (Because now that you spend so much time on the Internet in order to avoid Dwelling on the Past.)   Make paper planes with New Yorker subscription postcards. Rearrange bedroom furniture. Tipple Nyquil from the bottle, and as your arms go numb and your chest sinks to the bottom of the mattress, think how much better life is now. Really! Your parents are no longer married, but everyone is eating high-quality local organic produce, only they're eating it alone and now no one gets to argue. Isn't that better? Excerpted from Home Remedies: Stories by Xuan Juliana Wang All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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