The Chinese Groove

Iowa Short Fiction Award winner Ma (The Year She Left Us) returns with an entertaining and compassionate view of fathers and sons, dreams and reality, immigration, community, and identity. In January 2015, protagonist Shelley (nicknamed for the poet) hopes to ride the Chinese groove—an unspoken sense of kinship, connection, and duty extended by Chinese immigrants to each other—as he acclimates to life in California after living his first 18 years in Yunnan Province. Unfortunately, Shelley’s dream of the United States does not live up to the expectations he gleaned from his aunties. Poets don’t make a living (much less a grand living), and his California family is not as rich and accommodating as first believed. James Chen narrates, mainly as Shelley, using a Chinese accent with British undertones that reveal how Shelley learned English in China. Chen skillfully transitions to voice a young boy, an older man, and even a Jewish woman. While there are some serious topics discussed, such as housing insecurity and political corruption, the story remains relatively light.