How do we survive our family, stay bound to our community, and keep from losing ourselves?  In All That Work and Still No Boys, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, Kathryn Ma exposes the deepest fears and longings that we mask in family life and observes the long shadows cast by history and displacement. 

Here are ten stories that wound and satisfy in equal measure.  Ma probes the immigrant experience, most particularly among northern California’s Chinese Americans, illuminating for us the confounding nature of duty, transformation, and loss.  A boy exposed to racial hatred finds out the true difference between his mother and father.  Two old rivals briefly lay down their weapons, but loneliness and despair won’t let them forget the past.  A young Beijing tour guide with a terrible family secret must take an adopted Chinese girl and her American family to visit an orphanage. And in the prize-winning title story, a mother refuses to let her son save her life, insisting instead on a sacrifice by her daughter. 

Intimate in detail and universal in theme, these stories give us the compelling voice of an exciting new author whose intelligence, insight, and wit impart a sense of grace to the bitter resentments and enduring ties that comprise family love.


An excerpt from The Long Way Home in All That Work and Still No Boys

No one in my family knows it was me who set the fire. I did it deliberately, meaning
this:  I made a loose pile of my sister’s eight most precious things—one for each year
I bore her existence—struck a match and coaxed forth a blaze. I was eight years old;
my sister Joanna was ten.  I didn’t know the house would go.  The beds, the sofa,
the green glass plates my mother used to serve cake. But I knew the match would
lead to fire, and fire to destruction of possessions held dear.  I was not so sorry
watching it all happen.  I was sorry later, the next twenty-one years.

My parents think it started at a faulty closet light. I will tell them today how it really
happened. I have chosen today as carefully as I cupped my hand and blew, delivering
my message with one long, giving breath. The paper caught, the fabric, too. They will
learn all about it at five o’clock.

It’s warm and sunny, a good day for confession.

“I’m here,” I call as I head up the walkway to my parents’ second house. My father
won’t remember that I told them I would visit, but my mother looks out the window,
waves a happy hand. They live in the flats, in a two-bedroom box built to match its
neighbors. Not as nice as their first house, but still, says my father, when anyone
complains—a house. A house.

“He’s wonderful today,” my mother tells me.  “His old self.”  She forgave him years
ago, six weeks after his own tearful confession; since then, she looks for signs of the
man she forced herself to absolve.

“Look, Dad.”  I hold up from my shopping bag a fat triangle of brie.  His doctors
have forbidden it, making it all the more worthy of his lust.

“Plenty ripe I hope,” he says. He’s sniffing at the package like a dog.

“Oozing,” I assure him; he smacks his drooping lips. For my mother I’ve brought
coffee beans and chocolates and embroidery needles I’ve already threaded in fifteen
different shades of orange and red. She’s working on a sunset, “Southwestern,”
she informed me, “for the little pillow on Dad’s old chair.”  I imagine the outline
of one noble cactus and layers of color indicating sky.

These are not bribes or offerings of peace. It is part of my job to supply delectables;
I’ve been doing so now for more than ten years. Joanna brings her troubles, and I
bring the bounty. A husband, five years older, and a promise of grandchildren in
one or two years. Words of assurance on health and money; even money itself, when
my parents need it. I work as a bookkeeper. I’ve learned accountability and caution.

“Joanna’s coming.”  My mother has settled into her chair, under the only decent lamp
in the room. I’m fetching her needlework; with my back to her, I make an extravagant
face.

“I thought she was away. In Oregon or something.”  I’m not all that surprised. 
My sister has a taste for drama, a sixth sense for spectacle and final acts.  She’s
discovered two suicides and seen a boy drown.