Table of Content
I imagined myself as one of the many characters - like Echo, a girl borrowing clothes from an apartment of someone who just died. Or Lucy, a youngest of three, who patted her newly-singled mom on the head, trying to cheer her out of her misery with no avail. "Tough, luminous stories about destiny, fealty, belonging and heartbreak... Wang unpacks unwieldy relationships with a light touch, slicing cleanly through the intricacies to render them instantly familiar.... Wang’s writing is sensory, cinematic and fluid." "Home Remedies doesn’t read like a first collection; like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, the twelve stories here announce the arrival of an exciting, electric new voice." The small town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is an unlikely location for a Playboy Resort, and nineteen-year old Sherri Taylor is an unlikely bunny. Growing up in neighboring East Troy, Sherri plays the organ at the local church and has never felt comfortable in her own skin.
This collection as a whole feels current and well-poised to make an impact in our changing society, while still relevant to long-drawn themes of family and connection and wanting to belong. Recommended to those who want a fresh, contemporary collection of short stories with a diversity of literary elements and points of view. Again, I loved when Wang wrote about real relationships and how parent abandonment, mismatch between Chinese culture and mainstream American culture, and other nuanced topics affected these relationships. She shows the emotional consequences of these cultural misunderstandings, as well as the love that remains between family and friends despite these differences. The twelve stories in Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut collection capture the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth. A generation for whom the Cultural Revolution is a distant memory, WeChat is king and life glitters with the possibility of love, travel, technology, and, above all, new identities.
How to Recognize a Heart Attack
Xuan Juliana Wang experiments with form several times throughout the book, sometimes employing impressionistic lists but just as often keeping things straightforward on the structural front only to swerve into magical realism to keep us on our toes. Her characters are traced in electric prose but carved in relief, silhouettes painted on the page with just enough detail, just enough narrative to make them indelible and intoxicating, relatable but ultimately unknowable. Wang is confident, subtle, and remarkably consistent, toying with expectations, cleanly sidestepping cliches, all that good stuff. In stories of love, family, and friendship, here are the voices, faces, and stories of a new generation never before captured in fiction.
Salt acts as a mild abrasive that helps remove stains and brighten teeth. It also contains a natural source of fluoride, which is a bonus for your teeth. Especially if it’s a recurrent one, like once a month, you need to read this chapter.
Home Remedies: Stories
The series of stories which make-up 'Home Remedies' explores the experiences of the 21st century Chinese diaspora both in China and across the Western world. Two themes permeate the stories; firstly the sense of dislocation and displacement felt by the nouveau rich, a sense that money and materials goods will somehow replace the sense of spiritual emptiness engendered by their sense of rootlessness. The collection is divided in three sections ('Family', 'Love', 'Time & Space'), each containing 4 stories. One would think that these stories somehow focused on the topic of the section they are in, but they don't. Take the story 'The Strawberry Years', I don't think it had anything to do with 'Love', and yet it was in that section (the story is a surreal 'someone is taking over my life' kind of thing). One would think that a father-daughter story would fit in the 'Family' category but no, we find it in 'Time & Space' instead.
When she wakes up the next morning she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.
What Causes Sagging Skin?
A very good collection that takes us around the globe while maintaining focus on the individual characters. Home Remedies is a gorgeous collection of stories about Chinese immigration, family structure, love, sex and the privilege of choices. The future for each character is never certain, and splits open guiding them to places they never imagined they would be. Home, some make their way in American life with ease, abandoning their old skins and sometimes their family too. Others cling to the old ways of a country they will never return to. One thing is certain, each person will make their own story, even if it means becoming someone other than what’s expected.
I was excited to read it because it's a collection of short stories from various perspectives of Chinese millennials and some of the stories are set in familiar places, like the Bay Area. However, almost all of these stories felt like talking to someone who seems to have a lot more depth than they actually do, when you get to know them. I feel like I've known these types of people before--who seem really ~broken~ and ~lost~ and if they have money and privilege, use it as a means to act out and demonstrate how ~messed up~ they are. I didn't feel like any of the characters were likeable, which isn't something I usually have a problem with, but there just wasn't much to them besides being unlikeable and doing immoral things. The writing was pretty good, but there wasn't much meat to sink my teeth in (or, should I say--there wasn't much soy curls to sink my teeth in, since I've stopped eating meat recently). This is a collection of stories about...what felt like the “modern” chinese, chinese american, chinese diaspora experience.
What drew me the most to Home Remedies was its cover , and while I wasn't expecting to like every single story, I hoped that I would find a few to be memorable. In twelve stunning stories of love, family, and identity, Xuan Juliana Wang’s debut collection captures the unheard voices of an emerging generation. Young, reckless, and catapulted toward uncertain futures, here is the new face of Chinese youth on a quest for every kind of freedom.
In Home Remedies, Xuan Juliana Wang introduces us to characters who have built their own universes. Green tea is rich in antioxidants thanks to its abundance of polyphenols, a type of micronutrient. Brewed tea bags can be placed on your face or around the eyes, or cut open and mixed with honey and other ingredients to create a face mask, to protect your skin from sun damage and slow the breakdown of collagen.
This supply chain is vulnerable and can be interrupted by something like an EMP. From the bestselling author of Sold On A Monday, a sweeping tale of an illusionist recruited by British intelligence in World War II. The debut novel of a gifted storyteller who has become a sensation in her native South Africa. Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, is set ... Elizabeth's mother was working as a nightclub hostess on US-occupied Okinawa when she met the American soldier who would become her husband. The language barrier and power imbalance that defined their early relationship followed them to the predominantly white, upstate New York suburb where they moved to raise their only daughter.
Pre-publication book reviews and features keeping readers and industry influencers in the know since 1933. In her debut, Wang examines the difficulties of immigration as sources of pain, connection, and confusion between friends, family, and would-be lovers. “Mott Street in July” is about a family of Chinese Americans, specifically the experience of the kids growing up as the first of their family in America—the sacrifices, pains, mistakes, and opportunities.
Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks and podcasts. Ammareal gives back up to 15% of this book's net price to charity organizations. Suyin Haynes is Editor-in-Chief at gal-dem, a U.K.-based publication committed to sharing the perspectives of people of colour from marginalised genders.
THIS IS WELL WRITTEN- easy, poetic, emotional, interesting, moving. I realize as I read all that back it sounds like I'm describing a travelogue, but Home Remedies isn't that at all. It's a swirl of characters built out of bundled observations, little bursts of thought and feeling, all perfectly rendered, somehow cohering into a series of tiny stories, but stories built on the backs of human-sized lives, if that makes sense.
In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist, his Russian-born psychiatrist wife, their precocious child obsessed with K-pop, a struggling Indian American writer, a wildly successful Korean American app developer, a global dandy with three passports. But when one of them commits a shocking act of violence in front of her, she flees New York City in search of Alice, the only person alive who can help her make sense of her past.
No comments:
Post a Comment