Two sisters leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles in this fresh, fascinating adventure.

"[A] searing debut." —i>O, The Oprah Magazine
In her powerful collection, first published in 2016 and now featuring new stories, Vanessa Hua gives voice to immigrant families navigating a shifting America. Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters span both worlds but belong to none, illustrating the conflict between self and society, tradition and change....

"A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home"--

"At 28, Kathleen Cheng returns home to live with her single mother, Marissa, an immigrant from China. Her mother, to Katheen's surprise, is in love, and Kathleen helps her mother plan her wedding to a tech entrepreneur. Kathleen takes a job working for an unusual start-up, and as mother and daughter peel back the layers of their history, they come to a new understanding of how they can propel each other forward, and what they've done to hold each...

"When we first meet Maria Lagana, she's rewriting scripts at Mercury Pictures, a failing Hollywood studio known for its schlock. Maria's job is to re-craft dialogue and action to circumvent the censors, a skill she's mysteriously adept at. Born in Italy, as a teenager Maria witnessed Mussolini's censors arrest her father, an event that will destroy her family and burden Maria with questions of guilt and responsibility she will carry with her throughout...

"When siblings Jacob and Belinda Nti were growing up in Ghana, their goal was simple: to move to America. For them, the United States was both an opportunity and a struggle, a goal and an obstacle. Jacob, an awkward computer programmer who still lives with his father, wants a visa so he can move to Virginia to live with his wife - a request that the U.S. government has repeatedly denied. He envies his sister, Belinda, who achieved, as their father...

"Dia Mittal is an airline call center agent in Mumbai searching for a better life. As her search takes her to the U.S., and eventually to Greater Los Angeles, Dia's checkered relationship with the American Dream dialogues with the experiences and perspectives of a global South Asian community across the class spectrum--call center agents, travel agents, immigrant maids, fashion designers, blue- and white-collar workers in the hospitality industry,...

Fulgencio Ramirez strives to succeed in America, break a mystical family curse, and win back Carolina Mendelssohn's love thirty years after their doomed youthful romance. 1950s. In the border town of La Frontera, young love blooms at first sight between Fulgencio Ramirez, the son of impoverished immigrants, and Carolina Mendelssohn, the local pharmacist's daughter. Their bonds will be undone by a force more powerful than they could have known. Thirty...