Why China?

by Jennifer Egan

A Vintage Shorts "Short Story Month" Selection

Sam Lafferty has hit bottom. Under investigation and on leave from the financial services firm that employed him, Sam has uprooted his wife and two daughters and dragged them against their will to central China. While on this rotten family vacation, in an alien and uncomfortable landscape, after years of deception, lousy investment, moral—and soon-coming financial—bankruptcy, and with his family in tow—Sam pursues the man who had first set him on a path to corruption from crumbling binguan hotels without soap or towels to Buddhist caves near Xi'an.

In this dazzling piece, selected from the stunning collection of short fiction Emerald City, by the critically acclaimed author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Jennifer Egan lays bare our capacity for failure.

An ebook short.

Genres: Short Stories

33 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 11, 2016

About the author

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize, and was named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine, and she recently completed a term as President of PEN America. Her new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in April, 2022, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022, as well as one of President Obama’s favorite reads of 2022.

Reviews

[Madison De Asis · Rating 1 out of 5]

The beautiful writing is abysmally undermined by the orientalism bleeding throughout the story that's so tacky it's comical

[John_g · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's about trust: a dishonest man is worried that he'll get caught, and neglects his family while confiding in the guy who caused the trouble.

[Bethany Whetstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the underlaying message in this short story.