Deceit and Other Possibilities

In her powerful collection, first published in 2016 and now featuring new stories, 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. 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's Student Writing Contest, 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, Hua writes about what wounds us and what we must survive. Deceit and Other Possibilities marked the emergence of a remarkable new writer and is now available more broadly.