Description

The figures in Jess Row’s amazing misinformation occupy “a town that may be just like a mirage, hovering above the floor: skyscrapers built on mountainsides, destinations swallowed in haze for days.” This really is Hong-Kong, in which a Chinese woman and her American instructor discover the “blindness” of bats within an attempt to find the cat of her suicidal mother; an American graduate student provokes a masseur into reliving the painful experience of the Cultural Revolution; a businessman falls in deep love with a prim club coordinator over the edge, in Shenzhen, and sees herself powerless to reduce the boundaries between them; an Inventory expert preoccupied with function pushes her husband to go to a Zen retreat, where he must arrived at terms with his faltering marriage.Scrupulously thought and psychologically penetrating, these seven reports reveal the numerous subtleties of race, gender, faith, and tradition in this most mystical of towns, even while they illuminate the most common of individual experiences.From the Hardcover version.