“How would you even know what happened? It happened to me, not to us.” In the workshop, the story is derided as “stereotypical” and “a kind of Asian minstrelsy“. When her story is published, she shares it with her mother, whose response is indignant. This is particularly poignant in ‘Peking Duck’, a metafictional narrative where a woman on an MFA program shares the story of her immigrant mother’s unpleasant encounter with a door-to-door salesman. It is our shifting identities that are at the centre of the book: the way we perceive ourselves and the way others perceive us, the way we write and rewrite our own histories and the histories of others.

‘When I think about Y now, I think less about the beginning than about the end, which is where all my feelings have now pooled, having rolled downward towards the inevitable outcome.’

We grapple with who we are and want to be. The stories are bizarre and unsettling at times, but despite the weirdness, they never stop feeling real: whether we’re living in our 2023 or a near-future world order where microplastics wreak havoc on our bodies and America has fallen spectacularly from grace (see: Tomorrow), the rhythm of human life follows the same patterns. A professor finds a liminal space in another dimension in the back of her office closet. A twenty-something aspiring PhD takes a banned drug (for old time’s sake) that turns her invisible. One lives in a house with 100 of their ex-boyfriends, but only two who matter: the one she was in love with and the one who beat her. After reading Ling Ma’s Severance, one of my favourite books of 2020 (and I’ll be so bold as to say this decade), I was going to read whatever she published next.īliss Montage is a surrealist collection of short stories narrated by Chinese-American women.

Bliss montage review