May-lee Chai, The Minnesota Star Tribune
Elaine Hsieh Chou's clever and beguiling short story collection "Where Are You Really From" explores issues of identity and belonging with a speculative twist.
In six stories and one novella, Chou takes on Western-centered notions of beauty, mail-order brides, massage parlors, generational trauma and artistic license. She flips stereotypes on their ears, turning her stories into funhouse mirrors that challenge her protagonists -- and readers -- to navigate worlds that are both strange and all too familiar.
For example, in "Mail Order Love(®)," women from Taiwan literally are shipped to the U.S. in cardboard boxes, after Congress bans all immigration, exploiting a loophole in which mail-order brides are "considered imported foreign goods." Chou details how one bride, Bunny, adapts to life in America, getting her GED, heading out with friends, and generally ignoring her decades-older new husband, Frank.
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"The rare moments she was at home, Bunny spent all her time in the living room watching Korean soap operas dubbed in Mandarin and smoking menthol cigarettes" as Frank turns to customer service chatbots, trying to figure out his purchase.
In "Carrot Legs" Chou examines the pressure to conform to impossible beauty standards. A 13-year-old girl visits her cousin in Taipei, where a photo booth's app shows her an idealized portrait: "my skin was fairer and clearer, my eyes, larger and brighter. How awful and wonderful, I thought, to witness my idealized form when I had lived in ignorance of it."
Realizing that "In America, I was not beautiful, but in Taiwan, I was ugly," the teenager becomes increasingly obsessed with a noodle shop owner who happens to be naturally beautiful, thinking of increasingly unhinged ways she might possess the woman's beauty as her own.
All the stories showcase Chou's audacious talent for wordplay alongside her deep empathy. Chou's debut novel, "Disorientation" (there's that wordplay), was a New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and Thurber Prize finalist.
While humorously unpacking stereotypes about identity, Chou never condescends to her characters. The stories can become surprisingly tender or melancholic and wistful or even furious.
For example, in "Happy Endings," a man goes to Hong Kong for its advanced virtual reality brothels, only to encounter an AI entity with terrifying intelligence, and a desire for vengeance.
In "You Put a Rabbit on Me," a young American woman, Elaine A, goes to Paris as an au pair in the hopes of finding herself, and literally does, encountering her doppelganger, Elaine B, who resembles her in every way except she is French.
Her fascination soon turns to jealousy: "Unlike my anger, which manifested in geriatric bags under my eyes and teenage acne breakouts, Elaine B wore her anger like a fur coat, timeless and luxurious. It was so unfair."
While Chou's protagonists fret and plot, readers will delight in these thoughtful, provocative and often very, very funny stories.
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Where Are You Really From
By: Elaine Hsieh Chou.
Publisher: Penguin, 337 pages.
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