Book Review: Elaine Hsieh Chou dazzles in short story collection ‘Where Are You Really From’

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An awkward adolescent girl travels from the United States to visit her grandmother and other relatives in Taipei, where she becomes obsessed by her older girl cousin and the bizarre fantasy of cooking and eating a woman who works in the dumpling store downstairs.

An American au pair goes to Paris to find herself and runs into her twin — a woman who looks exactly like her, and even shares her first name, but has the French style and social life she lacks. The American admires her French doppelganger, who with her red lipstick and not-too-white sneakers “knew exactly what she wanted and what she didn’t. She was who I had always wanted to be.”

Author Elaine Hsieh Chou dazzles with these rich, highly original and sometimes shocking stories in her collection of fiction, “Where Are You Really From.” Chou wanders in and out of a kind of magic realism, exploring our capability for self-deception and cruelty.

The book containing six distinct short stories and a much longer novella about a writer’s affair with a married artist, “Casualties of Art,” follows Chou’s successful 2022 debut novel, “Disorientation.” That earlier book was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, and a finalist for both the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist and the Thurber Prize.

In Chou’s latest book, a short story called “Mail Order Bride” tells of a future United States where all immigration has been banned, except for brides purchased online and shipped from abroad.

Frank, a widower in Orange County, California, orders a young Taiwanese bride who arrives at his home via express shipping in a ventilated cardboard box and carrying no belongings, only the wedding dress she wears.

Frank, who is pushing 70, and the 25-year-old woman who calls herself Bunny immediately wed in a civil ceremony. Afterward, the couple go to Frank’s home, where the bride opts to sleep in the childhood bedroom of Frank’s adult daughter.

Frank remains deeply lonely and ignored as Bunny befriends a group of young people who, like her, are studying for the GED, the equivalent of a high school diploma.

Bunny can’t understand Frank’s sadness, which she had thought could be cured in the U.S. by an over-the-counter product or by calling customer service.

But she and Frank finally realize they share an experience with the sudden death of a beloved family member, and that death is the only thing they can’t buy themselves out of.

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