Publisher's Synopsis
In this lyrical collection, May-lee Chai explores the diversity of the Asian-American experience, challenging stereotypes while experimenting with form, language, metaphor, and myth. In The Dancing Girls Story, a goddess fleeing the civil war in Cambodia is picked up by a Coast Guard ship and interrogated by uncomprehending INS officials. In Nai-nais Last Words, a son ponders the meaning of his mothers ghostly appearance after her death. In Easter, the biracial children of a Nebraska farmer and his Filipina showgirl wife must cope with the loss of their mother as well as their fathers way of life in their small farming community. In Mr. Chu Returns to His Sleeping Wife, an elderly Chinese mans dreams meld with reality as he faces his own mortality. In Saving Sourdi, a thoroughly Americanised Cambodian teenager vows to save her more traditional older sister from an arranged marriage. And in the final story, Your Grandmother, the War Criminal, an elderly Japanese-American woman uses the principles of origami to teach her granddaughter about the many layers of their familys complex history. In her title essay, Glamorous Asians, Chai combines family stories with musings about the nature of cultural representation and images of beauty in America for a witty send-up of the American glamour industry. Her final essay explores, with humour and insight, continuing notions of Yellow Peril amidst political scapegoating as well as images of Chinese-Americans as eternal foreigners in their own country. Together, these stories and essays provide a unique portrait of a diverse world.
