“Set across China, America and Mars, this collection depicts the toll of migration on families strained by physical distance and sacrifice. Across all the stories Chai builds remarkable tension, masterfully arranging all the pieces on the board to hook the reader.”
—The New York Times Editor’s Choice “9 New Books We Recommend This Week” Dec. 29, 2022
“Tomorrow in Shanghai is May-lee Chai’s beautiful follow-up collection to her award-winning collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants. These stories examine the lives of people in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and people of Chinese descent living throughout the world. Whether the characters are rich or poor, male or female, living in the city or the country, each story looks at issues of prejudice, power dynamics, and interpersonal struggles in the globalized world.”
—Book Riot “20 New Must-Read Short Story Collections” Oct. 31, 2022
“Set in China and across its diaspora, the latest collection by award-winning writer May-lee Chai is complex and courageous, inspiring and insightful. “—Ms. Magazine, “August 2022 Reads for the Rest of Us”
“May-lee Chai’s abundant gifts as a writer are on full display in this collection. In these stories we find people displaced, people who find themselves, by choice or by accident, navigating foreign lands and strange worlds, looking for the way home. With invention and nuance, Chai creates a sense of heightened awareness, of distance, both physical and emotional. Illuminating, heart-breaking and yet also very funny, Tomorrow In Shanghai is a rewarding and entertaining read.”
—Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of Interior Chinatown
“There’s a beautiful directness in these stories that is itself a kind of moral courage. This collection is full of heartbreak and love, unbearable yearning and fulfillment, and, over and over again, the pain of not being seen—and in May-lee Chai’s sentences, there is wondrous seeing. Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories is a superb and powerfully affecting collection.”
—Clare Beams, Bard Fiction Prize-winning author of We Show What We Have Learned and The Illness Lesson.
“Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories by May-lee Chai is an insightful, empathetic collection with a vast and imaginative range. These stories and narrators across the Chinese diaspora examine the complexity of familial relationships, probe our most formative experiences and memories, and ask what it means to belong.”
—K-Ming Chang, author of Bestiary
“Chai plunges into the caverns of the human experience and untaps a rich bounty. Tomorrow in Shanghai is a tribute not only to Chinese immigrants but to anyone who has seen the American dream come up short.”
—Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of A Kind of Freedom (longlisted for the National Book Award) and The Revisioners (winner of the NAACP Image Award)
“ “Brilliant because there is no attempt to declare who or what is right or wrong, good or bad, but rather underscore the emotional paradoxes and ambivalence of migratory cultures in a fast-changing world.” and ambivalence of migratory cultures in a fast-changing world.”—
—JANET YANG, producer of The Joy Luck Club and President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Read the full interview here.
