"The father, a reticent person by nature, has had only one passion during his entire life: boxing. He has had no aspiration to actually fight, but he has trained relentlessly behind closed doors, away from his son and family, and his obsession has seeped into the working of his heart and his "flesh and bones." As the ambulance speeds to the hospital, the son witnesses his father awaken, curl his hands into fists and box with a phantom opponent,"
"In "Up at Night," a pregnant novelist is so engrossed by the unfolding story of a retired college professor arrested for rendering sex workers infertile with chemicals that she ends up miscarrying her own baby. In the title story, a self-described fifth-rate actor compulsively rehearses for his new role as a hit man in a movie to the point that he begins to have violent fantasies."
Narratives center on protagonists consumed by single-minded fixations that estrange them from their present circumstances and blur boundaries between life and death, past and present, reality and fantasy. Settings range from contemporary Beijing to scenes tied to the Japanese invasion and China’s economic reforms of the 1980s. Protagonists are often working-class or downwardly mobile urbanites whose compulsions reshuffle daily life: a father who trains alone in boxing until his body and heart reflect that obsession, a pregnant novelist who miscarries after becoming absorbed in a disturbing plot, and an actor whose rehearsals generate violent fantasies.
Read at The Nation
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