A short story collection exploring cultural complexities in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and the world at large. In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants , May-lee Chai’s latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality—always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power.  These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world. "This slim but wide-ranging work is a great achievement." —STARRED Review,  Publishers Weekly "Chai bears cleareyed witness, with righteous anger swirling beneath her pellucid prose." — Kirkus “May-lee Chai's abundant gifts as a writer are on full display in this collection. In these stories we find people displaced, people who find themselves, by choice or by accident, navigating foreign lands and strange worlds, looking for the way home. With invention and nuance, Chai creates a sense of heightened awareness, of distance, both physical and emotional. Illuminating, heartbreaking, and yet also very funny, Tomorrow in Shanghai is a rewarding and entertaining read." —Charles Yu, National Book Award–winning author of  Interior Chinatown "There’s a beautiful directness in these stories that is itself a kind of moral courage. This collection is full of heartbreak and love, unbearable yearning and fulfillment, and, over and over again, the pain of not being seen—and in May-lee Chai’s sentences, there is wondrous seeing.  Tomorrow in Shanghai  is a superb and powerfully affecting collection." —Clare Beams, Bard Fiction Prize-winning author of  We Show What We Have Learned  and  The Illness Lesson " Tomorrow in Shanghai  by May-lee Chai is an insightful, empathetic collection with a vast and imaginative range. These stories and narrators across the Chinese diaspora examine the complexity of familial relationships, probe our most formative experiences and memories, and ask what it means to belong." —K-Ming Chang,  Bestiary “Chai plunges into the caverns of the human experience and untaps a rich bounty.  Tomorrow in Shanghai  is a tribute not only to Chinese immigrants but to anyone who has seen the American dream come up short." —Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, author of  A Kind of Freedom  (longlisted for the National Book Award) and  The Revisioners  (winner of the NAACP Image Award)  Praise for  Useful Phrases for Immigrants “It’s as if the author is getting out of her own way, giving herself space to focus on the mechanics of one individual narrative at a time. Yet in each there’s a sense of many other narratives just off the page, the lives and back stories we aren’t seeing. Short stories are by definition brief, but they needn’t be small.”  — New York Times “Immersive and complex, Chai’s characters confront questions about class, family, sexuality, love, longing and more. The sign of a strong collection is one where the stories work together to inform the reader, and Chai’s eight tales do just that.”  — Washington Post “Chai doesn’t give us op-eds decorated with human fixtures. Instead, we get human lives in which migration is one shaping force jostling alongside many others, including puberty, sexuality, disease, and old age.”  — The National “Chai’s latest is a slim volume featuring a diverse assortment of tales that explore immigrant identity in unique ways.”  — Entertainment Weekly  “New & Notable” “buzziest books” guide and “20 New Books to Read in October” The Millions  “Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview;”  Elle  “28 Best Books to Read in Fall 2018;”  Electric Lit  “46 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2018;” and  Bustle  “11 Most Anticipated Books Published by Indie Presses to Have on Your Radar in 2018,” “Finished Crazy Rich Asians? Try These 8 Books Next,” and “‘Useful Phrases For Immigrants’ By May-Lee Chai Explores The Effect Of Globalization, Class, And Race On Family Dynamics” “With her masterful short story collection, Chai proves with exquisite craftsmanship that less can be so much more. In quiet moments of family drama, Chai shines a light on the deeper truths.”  — Booklist  (Starred Review) “May-lee Chai’s  Useful Phrases for Immigrants  is distinguished by writing as elegant and delicate as a snowflake…Devastating and graceful in equal turns, this collection confirms Chai’s place among the best Asian American writers of today.”  — Foreword Reviews  (Starred Review) “Cha