Maturity and Mastery

Useful Phrases for Immigrants is a new story collection from May-lee Chai, a writer who has already received recognition for her young adult fiction (Tiger Girl, 2013) and for her memoirs. In this new book, Chai has produced a nuanced and very perceptive portrait of Chinese and Chinese-American lives in the last fifty years. The author lived and worked in China in the past, and her firsthand experience of the country has enabled her to give her reader compelling glimpses of Chinese perspectives, with convincing detail that is not always available to Chinese-American writers who attempt to portray their family’s country of origin. The stories of Chinese life, including “Fish Boy” and “The Body,” show imaginative scope in their delineations of the reactions of ordinary working people to violence, tragedy, and even a ghostly apparition.

Arguably the best work of the collection, though, appears in Chai’s renderings of Chinese-American experiences. A highly memorable story, “First Carvel in Beijing,” presents the first-person account of Jun-li, a Chinese-American graduate student, and her rendezvous with her former lover Luce, an American expatriate. The time of their meeting, “six years after Tiananmen,” places the story in 1995, in a booming Beijing that has recently seen the opening of the first Carvel ice cream store, a place that Jun-li associates with both sweet and bitter memories of her childhood. Rescuing this kind of memory from the quotidian and the purely nostalgic, Chai has her narrator remember that her family “always got a cake for my brother’s birthday, personalized,” but then immediately recounts her own vomiting episode outside a Carvel store after her accidental discovery of her mother’s infidelity. Unlike Jun-li’s admittedly gluttonous and simple enjoyment of the Carvel cake, the reader’s consumption of the story allows a recognition of the layers and complexities of forgiveness and self-forgiveness. Jun-li’s understanding of her former lover’s weaknesses makes this story a mature reflection upon loss and sexuality.

Chai’s attention to sexuality can be comically entertaining as well. When twelve year-old Lu-lu’s mother takes her shopping for a training bra in “Canada,” Lu-lu vividly recollects her simultaneous excitement and humiliation: “I said, loudly, ‘Oh, look at the bathrobes,’ and pointed past the bras to the tangled rack of robes, just in case anyone was watching us, just to throw them.” Lulu’s embarrassment avoids the cliché because all around her are the signs of adult sexual life, including the rather frightening body of her breastfeeding aunt, Mei. Lu-lu is fascinated and horrified by her breasts, returning to their description several times in the story, as in this instance, “Then she unbuttoned her blouse, and I got to see her nursing bra, bright white and thick with snaps and triangular flaps that exposed the nipples, which were swollen and purply red, the areolas dark as bruises. She put a wet, cold Lipton teabag over each nipple, sighing.” Although Chai’s preferred genre is certainly more serious than comedic (as the end of “Canada” shows), her light comic moments provide much of the emotional appeal of this story collection.

What makes the collection fresh, what justifies the rather daring title Useful Phrases for Immigrants, in a publishing landscape in which the “immigrant story” has become the norm in Asian-American fiction, is Chai’s breadth and depth of narration. This is first and foremost a twenty-first-century account of Chinese-American (and Chinese) experiences, and her lesbian historians, restaurant employees, crane operators, lorazepam-popping widowers, vengeful daughter-in-laws, and so many other characters comprise what is ultimately a celebratory rendering of our common joys and tragedies.

To turn from May-lee Chai’s collection to Marilyn Chin’s latest book of poems requires a recalibration, to...