Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go

Qian’s bold and affecting debut collection explores aging, desire, cultural identity, and queer love among Asian girls and women. In “Zeroes:Ones,” Luna, 22, struggles to reconcile her Asian and American identities while on a fellowship in Suzhou, China, where she nurses her loneliness by playing a dating simulation game and keeping up a texting-only friendship with a stranger she calls Zero-One. Performance and reality collide in the eerie title story, which features a group of 20-somethings attending a cultish retreat on Mount Haruna in Japan, where the characters’ charged relationship dynamics come to a head, leading to an unexplained disappearance. Other stories delve more explicitly into the uncanny, as in the immersive “The Girl with the Double Eyelids,” in which a teenager who’s recently undergone eyelid surgery starts glimpsing imaginary symbols on other people’s bodies—an enormous pink tongue on the back of her teacher’s neck, a string of letters on her father’s wrist—that she believes might point to secrets they’re hiding. Throughout, Qian depicts with honesty and compassion her protagonists’ complex inner lives, portraying people who are by turns thrilled and afraid, desirous and resentful as they grapple with the anxieties of growing up. This is necessary and poignant. Agent: Annie Hwang, Pande Literary. (Aug.)