About this item
A short story collection exploring cultural complexities in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and the world at large. In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai's latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality - always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power. These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny.
About the Author
May-lee Chai is a writer and educator. She is the recipient of an NEA Grant in Literature: Fellowship in Prose. In addition to her books, she has published numerous short stories and essays in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Zyzzyva, The Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, The North American Review, the Missouri Review, and Seventeen. She used to be a reporter for the Associated Press.
May-lee was born in California but has lived in fourteen states and four countries. She majored in French and Chinese Studies at Grinnell College in Iowa. May-lee received her M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University. She also completed an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.
She once walked to Burma from Xishuang Banna in Yunnan province in China. She sat under a thousand-year-old pagoda but did not attain enlightenment. She is addicted to Korean soap operas.