then a magazine editor at Scholastic Publishing,
and an associate editor for the Web site Virtually
React. Chiu is also a cofounder of the Asian-Amer-
ican Writers Workshop. She has served as an editor
of the literary magazine Tin House, and conducted
workshops in creative writing at the Hudson Valley
Writing Center.
Three of her books of nonfiction were pub-
lished before Troublemaker and Other Saints. Tw o
of these have been behavioral guides: Eating Dis-
order Survivors Tell Their Stories (1998) and Te e n
Guide to Staying Sober (1998). The third, Notable
Asian-Americans: Literature and Education (1995),
most closely complements the ethnic focus of her
fiction, but the issues addressed in the other two
books are also echoed in the themes of some of
the stories.
Troublemaker and Other Saints, a finalist for
the Asian American Literary Award and a Book-
of-the-Month-Club selection, contains 11 short
stories so linked by recurring settings, characters,
and themes that some reviewers have asserted
that the collection comes close to being a novel.
The stories concern the experiences of several
generations of people in the Wong family, as well
as their connections to three other families—the
Shengs, the Tsuis, and the Tungs. In their settings
the stories range from Hong Kong and New York
City to Australia. Although they treat a consider-
able range of themes, at a fundamental level the
stories concern the issues and difficulties faced
by Asian Americans in trying to assimilate into
American culture.
In the title story, a young man rambunctiously
flings a can of beer out into the street on the first
day of the year. Unfortunately, the can hits an old
man and seriously injures him. To make him con-
front the consequences of his impulsiveness, his
mother compels him to take care of the old man
during his recovery. The irony is that typically the
protagonist has been a victim, not the victimizer.
In particular, he has been the frequent target of
his brother’s physical and emotional abuse. In a
further ironic turn, in caring for the old man, the
protagonist begins to come to terms with his own
victimization.
The abusive brother is the main character in
two stories—“Trader,” in which it becomes clear
that his anger is rooted in a deep sense of racial in-
feriority, and “Gentleman,” a story of multilayered
ironies in which he marks the transfer of Hong
Kong from Great Britain to China with a Chinese
woman who, despite her obvious sexual experi-
ence, has never slept with another Chinese man.
This woman’s story is told more fully in “Beauty,”
which chronicles her attempt to subvert the ste-
reotype of the sexually submissive Asian woman
through a series of short-term relationships with
Caucasian men, many of whom she meets through
personal ads. She seeks to dominate these men
thoroughly, even to the point of considering when
it will be most painful to the man to cut off each
relationship.
In “Copycat,” Chiu depicts the effects of a young
woman’s suicide on her parents and her brother.
Her father seeks refuge in her bedroom, trying to
discover some psychic conduit to her spirit. Her
mother becomes obsessed with transforming every
feature of the landscaping of their yard, channeling
her emotions into the eradication of every altera-
tion that proves unsatisfactory, as most of them
do. And her brother becomes a devout Buddhist,
retreating into lengthy sessions of meditation that
seem to serve not to mitigate his grief but to shield
him from it.
“Doctor” concerns a young girl, suffering from
an eating disorder, and her physician, incapable of
maintaining an appropriate professional distance
in treating the girl because she has herself suffered
periodically from an eating disorder.
Martin KichChoi, Sook Nyul (1937– )
Born in Pyungyang, North Korea, in 1937, Sook
Nyul Choi began writing poems and short stories
when she was in elementary school. Choi was in-
spired to come to the United States during high
school after reading Henry Wadsworth Longfel-
low’s poem “I Shot an Arrow.” After graduating
from high school, she enrolled in Ewha Univer-46 Choi, Sook Nyul