In this powerful debut collection, Vanessa Hua gives voice to immigrant families navigating a new America. Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters straddle both worlds but belong to none.
These stories shine a light on immigrant families navigating a new America, straddling cultures and continents, veering between dream and disappointment. From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal, to an obedient daughter turned Stanford pretender, from a Chinatown elder summoned to his village, to a Korean-American pastor with a secret agenda, the characters in the collection illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. In “What We Have is What We Need,” winner of The Atlantic student fiction prize, a boy from Mexico reunites with his parents in San Francisco. When he suspects his mother has found love elsewhere, he fights to keep his family together.
With insight and wit, she writes about what wounds us and what we must survive. Deceit and Other Possibilities marks the emergence of a remarkable new writer.
Vanessa Hua is an award-winning journalist and writer, and a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. For nearly two decades, she has been writing about Asia and the diaspora, filing stories from China, Burma, Panama, South Korea, Abu Dhabi, and Ecuador. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, Guernica, and elsewhere.
Industry Reviews
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 and Highwire Moon
Fast-paced, dazzling, smart, and fun, Vanessa Hua's debut collection illustrates the insanities and heartbreaks on both sides of the Pacific.
- GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Story
Deceit and Other Stories gives us characters whose lives are constrained and yet also enriched by different borders, cultures, and traditions. A bracing and beautiful debut, full of fire and light.
-LAILA LALAMI, author of The Moor's Account
Complicated, cosmopolitan and utterly contemporary, Deceit and Other Possibilities is a richly enjoyable collection. Hua is expert at creating both empathy and suspense whether it's in the emptiness of a national park or the crowded space of an international flight. These stories will jump right off the page into the reader's imagination.
-MARGOT LIVESEY, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Hua's thoughtful use of themes, such as scandal, transit and redemption... expand and dramatize the connections between Asian diasporic characters as complex, mobile and at turns hilariously and painfully human.
-JUDGES' NOTE, San Francisco Foundation, James D. Phelan Award for Fiction
