Rough Landing

In 2020, Jack Wang, a much heralded author of children’s books, published his first book for adults, We Two Alone, an inspired collection of six stories and one novella set in several areas of the world, including Vancouver’s Chinatown, Vienna, and Port Elizabeth, South Africa. In “Belsize Park,” for example, the narrator, a young Chinese student and the son of immigrants, meets a young girl at Oxford. “I couldn’t quite believe I had fallen in with someone like Fiona, so clever and lovely and thoroughly English,” he says. But when they visit her home in London, they soon realize their budding relationship can never sustain the forced politeness of her parents. They also conclude that she will never meet his parents, who run a takeout shop in Stoke-on-Trent. All the seven tales, vividly realized portraits of significant moments for a sprawling diaspora, indict the ostracism behind the racist taunts and trials that bedevil our beleaguered society.

Now, five...