16 Jun / We Two Alone: Stories by Jack Wang [in Shelf Awareness]
*STARRED REVIEW
The Chinese diaspora is dispersed across continents and decades in Jack Wang’s magnificent debut, We Two Alone (selected as one of the CBC’s 2020 Best Canadian Fiction and Quill & Quire‘s 2020 Books of the Year). Wang’s seven-story collection traverses North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, pausing at pivotal moments over a century of history, each presented through a peripatetic Chinese lens.
Wang’s opening story, “The Valkyries,” features a Vancouver orphan teen, indentured to an opium-addicted laundry owner, who starts playing women’s hockey after the men’s team rejects him for being Chinese. In “The Night of Broken Glass,” a Chinese diplomat family posted in Vienna is witness to Kristallnacht and the beginnings of its horrific aftermath. Wang’s grandmother inspired “The Nature of Things,” about a Canadian couple who move to Shanghai, only to be swept up in the exodus as the Japanese invade the city in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. A medical student in South Africa is driven by apartheid to move elsewhere in “Everything in Between.” Love – and Oxford degrees – can’t bridge the divide for a wealthy Londoner and Chinese immigrants’ son in “Belsize Park.” In “Allhallows,” a Chinese Canadian hockey player, demoted to a Florida team, takes his sons trick-or-treating one day late. And the titular “We Two Alone” intimately reveals the implosion of a 20-year marriage between two actors.
Wang’s protagonists are ethnically Chinese, but their lives – either by birth or circumstances – happen beyond national borders, as they adapt (or not), plant (or not), merely survive and sometimes thrive around the world. Global citizen Wang, a Vancouver transplant teaching at Ithaca College, writes with masterful assurance, eschewing labels, and creating exquisite gems of universal empathy.
Discover: The seven impeccable stories in Jack Wang’s excellent debut collection feature a diasporic Chinese cast over decades and across continents.
Review: “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness, June 15, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020 (Canada), 2021 (United States)