Summary: Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to another addition of the avid reader. Today our guest is Xuan Juliana Wang, Author of Home Remedies - her first collection of short stories, published in May by Hogarth. Xuan’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Plowshares, Pushcart, and The Best American Non-Required Reading Anthologies. She is a fiction editor at Fence. She moved to Los Angeles around 7 years old and teaches at UCLA. Home Remedies is a collection of stories that seem disparate but in many ways not, because they all tell Chinese stories, but because they are linked together in a way that I cant’t really articulate. At first they may seen totally alien to our lives, our culture, but upon reflection, or a second reading, the parallels in thought, emotion, empathy, or lack thereof, and action become exceedly familiar. Whether it’s abandoned children, Walnut, Pinetree and Lucy (see, alien at first) who may not really be abandoned TO Singers with Mohawks, rich kids who have nothing to do but cruise, do drugs, and pretend to make music videos (definitely not alien) OR Hucksters/maybe not, who long for awe, wonder, and acceptance, allow these characters, ofttimes unhappy or uncertain to have an arc of space and time that sometimes is measured in milliseconds, sometimes in years.
