“Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories” by May-Lee Chai

May-lee Chai

Home is an overarching theme in May-Lee Chai’s engaging new collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories, as she covers ground from China to the United States to a science fiction land beyond Earth. 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.

In “Jia”, which means home in Mandarin, a young biracial girl named Lu-lu is torn between her fighting parents. Her father is an academic and teaches in a small town in Indiana, a place that is not very welcoming to their mixed race family. At a birthday party, Lu-lu is teased and thinks she can find solace at home, only to return to find her father has thrown his plate of dinner against the wall and her parents are arguing. She internalizes these fights and wonders if she is at fault.

 

Lu-lu didn’t confront her parents about their behavior and how it made her feel—small and ugly and worthless—because of the small, nagging, and ugly feeling that perhaps her parents were in fact angry at her, were worry she’d been born, were disappointed that she stood out racially from the other kids in this town, her features so obviously a blend of their own, which made them seem naïve about their love, like suckers even. Lu-lu couldn’t imagine how her parents had expected her to turn out, but their anger at each other made her feel responsible for not measuring up.

 

Lu-lu appears again in the following story, “Slow Train to Beijing”, set in late 1989. Now a teacher in Nanjing, Lu-lu lives in a dormitory for foreigners and meets another Chinese-American woman named Alex who is visiting from Beijing. Alex extols the benefits of life in Beijing and encourages Lu-lu to visit her there, which Lu-lu’s does Alex on her break that winter. On the twelve-hour train ride north, Lu-lu frets. From what Alex had told her, people in the capital city—both foreign and local—are sophisticated and worldly.

 

She imagined going to the Great Wall for a picnic and the Summer Palace and Forbidden City. Lu-lu tried to think of clever things to say, references to history, to the Qing dynasty, to Manchu social protocol that she had studied in college back in the States and that she’d found fascinating. She wished she’d thought to bring one of her old textbooks. She was afraid she’d seem boring compared to all of Alex’s cool friends in Beijing. She wanted to hold her own.

 

But at least in Lu-lu’s case, the woman from the provinces manages to hold her own.

 

Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories, May-lee Chai (Blair, August 2022)
Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories, May-lee Chai (Blair, August 2022)

“Hong’s Mother” also features another character with a white mother and Chinese father. Hong is a 19-year old university student in France and her mother has just won a church raffle that includes an airline ticket. Hong left the United States to get away from her family, yet now her mother is coming to visit. Soon after her mother arrives in Paris, Hong thinks back to her childhood in the US.

 

Sometimes growing up, Hong had wondered if her mother was embarrassed by her presence. The way all the white women in the town asked if Hong were adopted, told Hong their stories of their cousins who adopted Korean babies or distant relatives in other towns who’d sponsored Vietnamese refugees in their churches. “Such beautiful children,” these women would say, their sharp white teeth flashing in their mouths.

 

While these stories have similar themes, the title story, “Tomorrow in Shanghai”, is set in the countryside and features a doctor from Shanghai who harvests the organs of executed prisoners. He misses his home in the big city and cannot wait to get back there. This is the first story in the collection and at first doesn’t seem to fit with the others which don’t have anything to do with Shanghai. But the last story, “The Nanny”, is set on Mars and is a science fiction tale of people who move to colonies modeled after Chinese cities, including Shanghai. Mars also appears in the title of an earlier story, “Life on Mars”, which centers around a teenage boy who is sent to the United States from China to live with an aunt and uncle so he can get a head start in the American educational system before applying to university there. His home in the US is so different from what he knew in China that he may as well live on Mars.

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.


Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.