Tomorrow in Shanghai

May-lee Chai is the author of the American Book Award-winning story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants and ten other books. Her prize-winning short prose has been published widely, including in the New England Review, Missouri Review, Seventeen, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The recipient of an NEA fellowship in prose, Chai is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

"This slim but wide-ranging work is a great achievement."—STARRED Review, Publishers Weekly"Chai bears cleareyed witness, with righteous anger swirling beneath her pellucid prose."—Kirkus“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, heartbreaking, 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 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 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, 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)

• Table of ContentsTomorrow in Shanghai Life on Mars Monkey King of Sichuan Hong's Mother White Rabbits Jia Slow Train to BeijingThe Nanny