Where Are You Really From

The six stories and novella in this scintillating collection from Chou (Disorientation) explore themes of beauty, identity, and morality. In “Carrot Legs,” a 13-year-old Taiwanese American girl visits her grandparents in Taipei, where she’s indoctrinated by her manicured cousin, LaLa, into the city’s ethos that “beauty was a choice.” It’s a message reinforced by the strange devices for sale at a local pharmacy, such as “funny-looking massagers designed to shrink your face.” Taipei is also the point of origin for the mail-order bride purchased by an aging American man named Frank in “Mail Order Love.” Ultimately, Frank gets more than he bargained for when his new wife, Bunny, adopts a liberating sense of self-confidence. Elsewhere, women’s attempts to improve their circumstances lead to vexing situations. Elaine, a crestfallen American whose life has become like “a soggy newspaper discarded in the rain,” travels to Paris to reinvent herself as an au pair only to encounter the horror of a doppelgänger who shadows her every move. Throughout, Chou’s surrealism feels all too real, whether in the concluding novella, “Casualties of Art,” an intimate exploration of an illicit affair, or in “Happy Endings,” the story of a DNA researcher in Hong Kong who visits a virtual reality sex-bot brothel where intercourse is a “constant negotiation, a high-wire act with the thinnest of lines separating pleasure from violence.” These expressive and atmospheric tales mesmerize. Agent: Ellen Levine and Martha Wydysh, Trident Media Group. (Aug.)