Books by May-lee Chai

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. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.

Training for adulthood is not for wimps. When you are eleven years old, is there anything more humiliating, or bound to cause a fight, than shopping with your mother when your body is in full-throttle warp? Yes, there is: picking out the school-required underwear. Or worse, your mother's male co-worker shows up at the scene. Or even worse: your brother wants to TALK about it at the dinner table. Rites-of-passage are difficult for any young girl, and Jun-li Lin is no exception. The grown-ups in her life are completely unpredictable, and probably out of control. She knows it will take detective-work to figure out her family's secrets and erratic ways. It's up to her to find a way to bring the family together before everyone drifts apart. Training to be an adult, Jun-li discovers, is hard work.

Nightmares of war flood the waking memories of Nea Chhim, a 19-year-old survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields. In this sequel to the acclaimed Dragon Chica, Nea, a struggling college student, decides she must confront the past. Without telling Ma, she hops on a cross-country bus in Nebraska to seek out her biological father in Southern California. Nea comes face to face with a man wounded by survivor's guilt who refuses to acknowledge the family's secrets. It is up to Nea to find the truth. Tiger Girl weaves together Cambodian folklore and its painful past with contemporary American life to create an unforgettable novel about love, war, and acceptance.

In the mid-1960s, Winberg Chai, a young academic and the son of Chinese immigrants, married an Irish-American artist. This book offers a depiction of the racism suffered by them in rural South Dakota.