This is the third work by Yan Ge that I’ve read now, and I think it’s safe to say that I’m just not a fan of her writing. I admittedly struggled to stay engaged with a few of these short stories (especially the final and longest one, “Hai,” which made up about a third of the book) and found most of them rather detached and distant. I do think that I’m missing something crucial here, and it’s why Ge’s prose never quite made sense to me and often read as disorienting and ambiguous. There’s no doubt that this collection has an interesting theme, which is this sense of being elsewhere and feeling like an outsider in more ways than one. I think this was more apparent in the short stories set in more modern times, but I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell you what role the historically rooted stories had in this collection. Perhaps the short story that I found most compelling was “How I Fell in Love with the Well-Documented Life of Alex Whelan,” which was a fascinating deep dive into a parasocial relationship and social media.

Again, I think I’m missing something crucial about Ge’s works, because other readers seem to have gotten a lot out of this collection (and other books by her) that didn’t click for me at all. I’m glad to have given her short stories a shot (and finding at least one that I enjoyed), but it was a bit disappointing that they largely didn’t work for me.