Carnegie Wong is Chinese-American, and his wife Blondie comes from a WASP-y old Yankee family. When Lan, a distant Wong relative, arrives from China to become their children's nanny, the tensions in the family increase, and Blondie suspects the girl may have been dispatched by Carnegie's mother to break up a relationship she never sanctioned. This complex portrait of a multicultural family, narrated in turn by most of the people involved, marks a departure for Gish Jen, taking on large themes and finding some hard-edged insights.

This collection of short stories by Chinese-born writer Ha Jin contains meditations on characters in the margin: a homosexual husband, counter help at an American fast-food restaurant, and a happy amnesiac satisfied in his new life. Ha Jin's previous collection won the National Book Award. This volume was named a New York Times Notable Book for the year 2000.

A Ph.D. candidate at a Chinese university tends the bedside of one of his professors, who is also his girlfriend's father and who in his illness and delirium rants about his past: his counterrevolutionary activities, his adulterous affairs, his dissatisfaction with his scholarly career. Inspired by the old man, the student gives up his own ambitions--and becomes one of the protestors in Tiananmen Square. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

The unusual main characters in this debut novel are a family of freed black slaves who hold slaves themselves. As the novel tells the stories of former slave Henry Townsend, his wife Caldonia, a man who hunts runaways for a living, and the various slaves on Henry's Virginia farm, a picture emerges of pre-Civil War America and the complexities of race, responsibility, and the institution of slavery. As the author stated in a Publishers Weekly interview: "I was trying to find out how these people survived in these horrifying conditions....I want to write about the things that helped us to survive: the love, grace, intelligence and strength of us as a people."

The unusual main characters in this debut novel are a family of freed black slaves who hold slaves themselves. As the novel tells the stories of former slave Henry Townsend, his wife Caldonia, a man who hunts runaways for a living, and the various slaves on Henry's Virginia farm, a picture emerges of pre-Civil War America and the complexities of race, responsibility, and the institution of slavery. As the author stated in a Publishers Weekly interview: "I was trying to find out how these people survived in these horrifying conditions....I want to write about the things that helped us to survive: the love, grace, intelligence and strength of us as a people."