China -- The Short Stories of Chen Ruoxi Translated from the Original Chinese: A Writer at the Crossroads by Chen Ruoxi and edited and translated by Hsin-sheng C. Kao

Best known for The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1978; see WLT 53:2, p. 345), Chen Ruoxi, now a naturalized American citizen, explained in a mideighties interview why she chose to turn away from the so-called "literature of the wounded": "I am very much interested in writing about Chinese living in American society. I want to write about how they think and live, their attitudes toward their split Motherland, and their problems of readjustment in America in the wake of the traumatic consequences of political chaos. I also intend to write about the scars of survival, the nuance and feeling of personal identity, and the vulnerability and ordinariness of being a Chinese-American." An emigre writer, she has also confessed elsewhere to the "inescapable" predicament of love for and at the same time estrangement from one's own culture, as well as a sense of marginalization. The stories...