The characters in Yiyun Li’s debut fiction collection are haunted by a common history. This history clings to their heels, weighing on their relationships, their choices, and the ways they spin their stories. These are characters pushed by rigid expectations, marked by failures and betrayals that they cannot reconcile. The past is always present, each moment a clear product of the years that preceded it. Li tells the stories of parents and children, of spouses and lovers in language that is naked, but not vulnerable. These are never happy tales. They are humble, the various levels of tragedy reduced to simple sentences.

China’s multilayered history pervades every line—Li was born in Beijing and came to the US in 1996. Li's characters have their own distinct memories, but their lives have all been built on the complicated foundations laid by the Cultural Revolution. Whether she is unwinding the tale of a murder or untangling love’s aftermath, Li's telling is eerily calm and measured. Her language is as stripped down as it can get, so that when one character speaks, “his voice reminding her of a satin dress,” it shimmers.

In the title story, a man visiting his daughter in America is forced to reckon with his own long-suppressed truths. He finds more connection with an Iranian woman he meets in the park than with his own daughter, with whom he at least shares a language. “Son” finds Han, a gay Chinese man living in America, back in Beijing visiting his mother, who has forsaken communism for Christianity. “The Princess of Nebraska” allows a glimpse of Sasha and Boshen, both former lovers of a beautiful young actor, now facing the frigid cold of Chicago together on Sasha’s way to have an abortion. Sansan, of “Love in the Marketplace,” is finally offered the thing she once wanted most, only to find that she has outgrown that which was once her whole world. “Immortality” tells of a boy who looks just like China’s famous, revered dictator, tracing his rise and fall along with the path of his country. Stories like "The Arrangement" are straightforward and sad. Characters collide with one another and then put up walls.

For all the stories’ intimate acquaintance with history and memory, the book feels oddly detached. But this is clearly Li’s intention. Such tokens of modernity as divorce, abortion and homosexuality are treated with appropriate tension as they bridge generations and continents, but the inherent drama is never exploited. In the end, we're left with the wreck that history leaves in its wake, people who can't let go of the past and others determined to sever all ties to it. Regardless, the lives of Li’s characters are often inextricable from the ravages of history. As witnesses, readers are left without the comfort of clean resolutions.