Chinese Stories in Times of Change

As the title of the collection suggests, David Wong's characters are mostly Chinese and their stories are set over the last fifty or so years, decades of dramatic and often terrifying change in China. Some, such as The Tennis Ball, depict pre-war Treaty Port life in China when, to a small boy from a poor Chinese family, a tennis ball seemed talismanic, symbolic of the leisured life of foreigners who could spend a whole afternoon hitting balls across nets whilst his mother, a servant aged before her time, worked for a pittance. For him, illusion was followed by disillusion but he was young enough to understand and learn. Learning, often from bitter experience, David Wong's characters seek resolution to eternal problems, sometimes complicated by external factors. Some do so with resignation, some with an admirable optimism.