An Empty Room

Characters occupy a haunting world of ambivalence and moral decay in Mu's English language debut, a collection about people unmoored by the changes that took place in 20th-century China. The author elides most of the horrors of WWII and the Cultural Revolution ("without getting into too much detail, what followed was a long, dark period of feeling neither dead nor alive"), but the psychological scars left by both lie at the heart of these stories: people are murdered, sent to labor on farms, and imprisoned for "decadent thoughts," offering context for the small but lacerating sorrows at the forefront of each story. A small boy loses a cherished object in "The Moment Childhood Vanished," an event that is both trivial and darkly ominous. Petty slights lead to shocking violence in "Eighteen Passengers on a Bus." Perhaps the most telling work is "Fong Fong No. 4," in which a young girl reinvents herself to suit the whims of history, becoming an intellectual, then a farm laborer, then a businesswoman, in the process shedding her identity, her sentimentality, and, finally, some of her humanity. These stories have an exquisite, crystalline quality ably captured by Liu's flawless translation. (May)