Vanessa Hua - Deceit and Other Possibilities: Stories

Contents

Praise for Deceit and Other Possibilities

Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature
Finalist for the California Book Award

This searing debut is about immigrants navigating a new America.

O, The Oprah Magazine

Profoundly moving, and impossible to forget... A truly impressive debut.

NYLON

The men, women and children in Huas moving debut often find themselves straddling the volatile fault lines between desire and shame, decorum and rage... She has a deep understanding of the pressure of submerged emotions and polite, face-saving deceptions. The truth comes out, sometimes explosively, sometimes in a quiet act of courage.

San Francisco Chronicle

An intriguing collection... Each of her protagonists is never quite grounded, caught between multiple cultures and countries. Each hides beneath layers of deceit, clinging to lies that enable survival... Hua is a writer to watch.

Booklist

Hua writes with sophistication and the punch of the immigrant experience today... Exuberant stories filled with nuance and fresh detail.

Literary Hub

Exactly what we need to be reading in this country right now, and probably always. If I had to choose one word to describe Huas writing style, it would be personableyou actually feel like her narrators are sitting across the sofa from you, popping open the tab of a soda can as they prepare to tell you their story... Funny and sad, quick-witted and thought provoking.

Bustle

A great writer, subversively funny... Characters that dont look anything like model minorities... Readable and human.

BuzzFeed

Shrewd... Hilarious.

VICE

These... stories follow immigrants to a new America who straddle the uncomfortable line between past and present, allegiances old and new.

The Millions, Most Anticipated

Rare and generous.

Bitch

The stories here are filled with desperate, confused, liminal people making questionable life choices... What lies at the core of the book is the unhappiness that tends to follow secrets and betrayal... Its a hard lesson learned, and one that most of the characters... eventually take to heart.

KQED

Heart-wrenching, implacable... Hua draws the reader in with her power of perception.

HuffPost, Book Club Pick of the Week

Theres little in the way of happy endings. But there is satisfaction in the utility of deceit and destruction, in the characters recklessly reclaimed ability to turn up the heat themselveseven if it means theyll burn.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Goes well beyond the buzzwords of identity politics and inflammatory headlines of the day.

Electric Literature

Readers will feel hijacked by the lines that follow... Hua shows how immigrant families plead, persuade, adapt, and embrace their heritage.

San Francisco Magazine

Gazes through the lens of recent immigrants to examine family relationships in all their beauty and complexity... Pointed, memorable tales.

Stanford Magazine

Diverse, cosmopolitan.

The Rumpus

A wonderful sense of modernity.

The Mercury News

The stories Hua presents are remarkably variedcomplicating blanket stereotypes about ethnic cultures... Those kinds of subtle contradictions between overlapping identitiesand the compromise they requireare what Huas stories pinpoint and gracefully unravel.

East Bay Express

Beautifully written, engaging, modern and insightful... A marvelous read!

Salinas Californian

These characters may make us want to turn away, but Hua finds a way to humanize all of them.

Vela

Complicated, cosmopolitan and utterly contemporary... These stories will jump right off the page into the readers imagination.

MARGOT LIVESEY, author of Mercury and The Flight of Gemma Hardy

Vanessa Hua inhabits in graceful and heartbreaking detail the people of her stories: strivers and betrayers, lovers and the landless, all of them on their way to transcendence in her hands.

SUSAN STRAIGHT, author of Between Heaven and Here

ALSO BY VANESSA HUA

A River of Stars

DECEIT AND OTHER POSSIBILITIES

Copyright 2016, 2020 by Vanessa Hua

First paperback edition: 2020

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hua, Vanessa, author.

Title: Deceit and other possibilities : stories / Vanessa Hua.

Description: First paperback edition. | Berkeley : Counterpoint Press, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019026333 | ISBN 9781640093485 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781640093492 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Short stories, American. | ImmigrantsUnited States Fiction. | GSAFD: Short stories

Classification: LCC PS3608.U2245 A6 2020 | DDC 813/.6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026333

Cover design by Donna Cheng

Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

Counterpoint Press

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parents

C ontents

Perhaps youve heard of me?

Maybe youve listened to a song by the Jump Boys, a group I fronted, which had three gold records that launched countless jingles for a remarkable array of consumer products. Or on television, as the host of a reality show where contestants dared to eat horse-cock sandwiches and cling to helicopters zooming over a tropical bay. On billboards, hawking heavy gold watches, cask-aged cognac, or alligator leather shoes, my shirt unbuttoned to reveal six-pack abs.

I didnt think so.

In America, most likely the only reference youve seen of me would be a blurb, news of the weird, along the lines of those funny Asians, at it again. Video game pets, robot butlers, used schoolgirl panties sold in vending machines, and the sex scandal involving Kingsway Lee, the Hong Kong star whose compromising photos were stolen off his laptop, posted on the web, and played out in the tabloids.

Thousands of shots from my cell phone, scoring with scores of women: the actress wife of my former bandmate; the Cantopop star and lover of a reputed mobster; and the daughter of a shipping magnate with ties to Beijing and the Red Army.