We Two Alone

“These moving stories are both global and intimate as they span the continents where the Chinese diaspora has settled. With ingenuity and impeccable craft, Jack Wang gives us an utterly remarkable collection that zeroes in on the emotional texture of utterly unique lives.” — Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer

“This impressive and vibrant collection of stories takes the reader by the hand, leading us across the world and back in time. But they’re all unified by the gentle sensitivity of Jack Wang’s prose and his ability to inhabit characters who long for freedom, connection, and fulfillment. Deeply humane and beautifully wrought, these stories stay in the heart and the mind.” — Alix Ohlin, author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists Dual Citizens and Inside

“Jack Wang’s dazzling first collection of stories, We Two Alone, moves through decades and across continents with rare ease, telling not the story but some of the many stories of the Chinese diaspora in the last century. These stories are so elegantly shaped, so satisfying as individual stories, that their collective power sneaks up on you. There is a quiet and building intensity to the storytelling here, a commitment to chronicling — with deep compassion and a refusal of easy answers — the dignity of human experience against the broader indignities of history. I was moved, heartbroken, and thrilled.” — Emily Fridlund, author of the Booker Prize finalist History of Wolves

“Jack Wang’s We Two Alone is not only a penetrating examination of the Chinese diaspora, it also brilliantly renders its subject in the most deeply resonant universal way, as the yearning for personal identity drives us all in our shared humanity. This is a remarkable collection of stories, a remarkable work of art.” — Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“A brilliant and ambitious vision of a hundred years of solitude: the Chinese diaspora navigated with courage, cleverness, and grace. Wang does this by following not a single family over generations but a dynamic cast of unforgettable characters as they scatter across the past century and across the globe, to Vancouver, Vienna, London, New York. For some, it’s a lonely journey; as Frank O’Connor said, in the best short stories we find ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ But these characters cross continents and oceans to free themselves from history and from their own ‘tiny flames,’ seeking peace, work, adventure, fame, and, above all, love. This is a delicately wrought and deeply moving book from an exceptional new voice.” — Eleanor Henderson, author of The Twelve-Mile Straight and Ten Thousand Saints