Over eight new stories, Chai keeps a steady hand on the scrabbled emotional terrain of expats and immigrants, city and country, and, briefly, a tired, spent Earth and a wealthy 'New Shanghai' colony on Mars. There is a familiarity about that friction, the awkward unease of the in-between. One gets the sense Chai has been mapping its edges for some time now ... Providing safe haven for one’s characters feels like an underutilized authorial power, a benevolence we’re taught to push back against in search of some greater gravitas. When Chai does it, it’s with startling confidence ... Here, characters are not defined by the crushing weight of representation, and instead of diminishing the impact or validity of these traumas, it simply robs them of their power. Chai does this again and again, elegantly yet forcefully subverting our preconceived notions as readers with each successive read. Tomorrow in Shanghai harnesses our attention, splitting it to show the shades of hope, fear, love and loss we’ve already brought to the page.
... deftly dramatizes the complicated ways that histories and identities intersect for members of the Chinese diaspora, in this case to create boundaries that forbid meaningful connection ... These two stories bookend this moving, well crafted collection perfectly, as they explore ways in which the human capacities for resilience and imagination, so obviously on display in immigrants' lives, shape our lives more broadly — and how essential they will be in determining forms of life in the future.
... engaging ... Some stories overlap when it comes to the characters and others when it comes to places; together they comprise an interlocking array of what it means to have a home ... While each of these stories can stand alone—many were previously published in literary journals—they work well together as tales that tackle identity, racism, sexism, and, of course, home.
Chai showcases in her insightful collection protagonists attempting to figure out their roles in their families and careers ... Throughout, Chai commits brilliantly to the characters’ competing drives for self-determination and approval, and conveys them with perfect subtlety. This slim but wide-ranging work is a great achievement.
... slim but powerful collection ... The collection depicts the toll of migration on families strained by physical distance and sacrifice ... Chai has a remarkable skill for building tension, masterfully arranging all the pieces on the board to hook the reader. For this reason, it is even more of a letdown when some stories end too soon, their falling action summarized too quickly and too neatly. In a way, though, these forced resolutions seem to reflect an underlying need in all of Chai’s characters. Far from home and family, they seek their own kinds of closure against the unknown.
Chai is straightforward in style, but her earnest, astute chronicling of the impact of the cruelties that people inflict on each other, whether in a small town on Earth or on a terraformed Mars, is powerful ... Chai bears cleareyed witness, with righteous anger swirling beneath her pellucid prose.
