Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Te-Ping Chen's stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. With acute social insight, he layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice. One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading Picks 2021.