Darren Huang
Alexandra Chang. Photo: Alana Davis In Alexandra Chang’s debut novel, Days of Distraction, the twenty-five-year-old narrator escapes her unfulfilling job as a tech reporter by moving from her native San Francisco to upstate New York with her longtime boyfriend. On their road trip across the country, she begins to question her relationship with J., who is white. Once they settle in Ithaca, the narrator finds herself feeling increasingly distant from her boyfriend, and spends her time collecting forgotten pieces of Asian American history and working in the archives of a historical museum. Dissatisfied with Ithaca, she heads to China, In the Chinese literary world, speculative fiction has long been a necessary means of critique and protest against an overbearing regime. Science fiction authors create new (often dystopian) universes as one of the few ways to criticize the government and contend with the legacy of the cultural revolution. In China, the state presides over most of the publishing houses, so when writers want to explore forbidden ideas about progress, humanity, and the balance between individuality and the greater good, it’s often safer to package them in the guise of speculative fiction. Still, the authors’ critiques of contemporary Chinese society are