Bookforum talks with Xuan Juliana Wang
“I wanted to evoke a certain kind of life that would be worthy of future nostalgia.” That’s a line from Xuan Juliana Wang’s story “The Art of Straying Off Course,” but it is also a way of reading all twelve stories in Home Remedies, her debut collection about Chinese millennials and their families. The book is a meditation on the nature of home, and how everything from immigration to the forward march of time precludes the possibility of ever returning there. In “The Art of Straying Off Course,” the narrator also says, “The secret to building things was listening.” Wang has listened to the