num_pages: 208
description: The characters in Jess Row’s remarkable fiction inhabit “a city that can be like a mirage, hovering above the skyscrapers built on mountainsides, islands swallowed in fog for days.” This is Hong Kong, where a Chinese girl and her American teacher explore the “blindness” of bats in an effort to locate the ghost of her suicidal mother; an American graduate student provokes a masseur into reliving the traumatic experience of the Cultural Revolution; a businessman falls in love with a prim bar hostess across the border, in Shenzhen, and finds himself helpless to dissolve the boundaries between them; a stock analyst obsessed with work drives her husband to attend a Zen retreat, where he must come to terms with his failing marriage.Scrupulously imagined and psychologically penetrating, these seven stories shed light on the many nuances of race, sex, religion, and culture in this most mysterious of cities, even as they illuminate the most universal of human experiences.
language: English
title: The Train to Lo Wu
titlecomplete: The Train to Lo Wu
genres: Asian Literature, Fiction, China, Short Stories
ratings_count: 123
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Kiriyama Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
publisher: The Dial Press