If I Were the Ocean, I'd Carry You Home

by Pete Hsu

Twelve short stories of warmth, terror, and humor, If I Were the Ocean, I'd Carry You Home, Pete Hsu's debut collection, captures the essence of surviving in a life set adrift. Children and young people navigate a world where the presence of violence and death rear themselves in everyday places: Vegas casinos, birthday parties, church services, and sunny days at the beach. Each story is a meditation on living in a world not made for us--the pervasive fear, the adaptations, the unexpected longings. A gripping and energetic debut, Hsu's writing beats with the naked rhythms of an unsettled human heart.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2022

Reviews

[Pete Hsu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote this book, so I'm biased. But please read for yourself when it comes out in October, and let me know what you think!

[Reading_ Tamishly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not work for me.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This debut story collection was the Nervous Breakdown Book Club selection for November 2022. The author is a Taiwanese American whose family emigrated to the United States when he was three years old.

His subject in these stories are children and young people adrift in the immigrant experience their parents are navigating.

At first I was put off by the way the stories would just end with no seeming resolution. Gradually I came to understand that for these kids and young adults there is only instability without the perspective of being old enough to understand the circumstances of people gone missing, families breaking up and a creeping sense of danger.

I concluded that the author had accomplished an amazing thing.

[Lynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deeply uncomfortable and also beautiful book of short stories. Like a shoe that’s a little too tight on your left foot, or getting dunked hard by a wave and getting sand in your teeth on the way back up to the surface.

[Carl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful story collection that finds its power as much in its care with what is not said as with what is.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some messed up stories…well written

[Victor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was an interesting book. I liked the themes and the premises of these stories, and I thought the characters were very enjoyable.

I struggled with finding common grounding between these stories? I’m not really sure where “each story is a meditation on living in a world not made for us” comes from. It just feels like an intellectually vague thing to say, and honestly I felt like there was a lack of common ground between these stories. Like, you could just sum it up to immigration and conflict, which is absolutely something worth exploring, but I just don’t think these stories had any more of an impact as an anthology compared to reading them stand-alone.

I also thought the prose was a bit lackluster. Just kinda contrived and rudimentary, like it was trying to emulate Hemingway without any of the character. A lot of descriptions were: “we did x. Because of x we did y. Now because of y suddenly I’m thinking again about x.” These kinds of sentences were all over, and it felt like the stories were trying to take a crack at experimental writing styles without actually understanding how to effectively use said style.

Good book, though. Glad I read it. Definitely a departure from what I’m familiar with but I thought overall I had a good experience with this book.

[Mary Camarillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pete Hsu’s short stories in “If I Were The Ocean I’d Carry You Home” are disarmingly disturbing, perfectly capturing trauma, terror and tragedy from the point of view of children and young people. Hsu’s sentences are deceivingly simple as well, which adds to the heartbreak of having no agency in this out-of-control world, where we give children guns to play with and turn them into “a kind of emotional firefighters... always looking out for emotional fire.”

There’s hope in Hsu’s pages as well. These characters are “Normal people caught in a twilight, in-between where they’re coming from and where they are going.” One young woman wonders if we “are all secretly good people…just waiting for some angel to tap us on the shoulder. ... Or maybe we are the angels.”

Or maybe not. Because after this young woman has this thought she immediately behaves in a very non-angelic way. A gripping collection that left me unsettled in the best possible way.

[Melanie Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first time I read a collection of short stories cover to cover before, and I enjoyed it!

Hsu’s collection of stories are uncomfortable, fun, heartwarming, and nailbiting. They tell the stories of so many different experiences that younger and older folks may have, whether these stories are fiction or not.

I found the language to be somewhat rudimentary, a sort of showing and not telling. I was hoping it would evolve as we got to the stories surrounding older folks, but it didn’t. There was a bit more depth, but for the most part, it was the same. The writing had a lot of the same cadence which often times made it harder to get through the short stories, but for others, made it go rather quickly.

I’d for sure recommend! Short enough and a great collection of different stories that it’s not too repetitive or boring.

[Melissa]

Read the first two stories and am DNFing. The writing style feels very undeveloped. An example from "Pluto": "He took us out to the city college stadium. It was around six-o'clock and still really hot when we got there. We stood around a minute while Dad did stretches. Then Stevie and Clayton said they wanted to play football. Dad said he was going to go jogging. Maddy then said she also wanted to play football too. Dad told them all that was fine and then looked at me. I would have rather played football too, but it seemed like Dad wanted me to jog with him. He didn't actually say that, but it's what I thought he wanted."

In the second story, "King Kong Korab," we have a character who is extremely fatphobic. He may have been elderly, but frankly, that's no excuse. It's uncomfortable to read, and maybe that's intentional with the multiple mentions of "fatso" but again, it feels unnecessary. Quite a few sentences in this story also contain a cringeworthy style of repetition. "The three of them walked out the backdoor. They walked into the backyard."

These are very short stories but even as flash fiction, they feel woefully incomplete.

[James Cafferty · Rating 3 out of 5]

An affecting collection of stories about generational trauma, Hsu does a really great job of making each story’s main character feel unique. I didn’t expect some of the protagonists to return later in the collection, and the concept of interconnecting the stories throughout the collection is cool. This collection is vivid, emotional, and thought provoking, though some stories veer into downright misery.

[autumn · Rating 3 out of 5]

part one wasn't for me; dunno why but it was difficult to get through and I just didn't like it all that much. part two was cool though! the connections between stories were so clear and so fun to draw. overall, love the themes and how human everyone felt

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great short story collection. Sparse language, uncomfortable situations, and a frequently unlikeable protagonist…but these stories have heart and I couldn’t stop reading them. It’s hard to ever see Reggie as anything but that pudgy, hurting little boy, which produced a shocking amount of empathy for a character I didn’t even really like.

[Ru · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry, couldn't connect with any of the stories.

[McCain Library]

This title is available as an eBook through McCain Library and can be accessed here: https://agnesscott.on.worldcat.org/oc...

[milo · Rating 4 out of 5]

got a little weird at the end there, but my point still stands: short stories are SO back

[Wilds · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book made me wish for more with every story told. <3

[Bia Pinho · Rating 4 out of 5]

heartwarming and heartbreaking and most things in between. loved it!!

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book of short stories I randomly picked off the library shelf. Didn’t love that concept.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really just an okay read for me. There was a lot of potential, but the execution wasn't quite right, and much of it wasn't fully rendered (which can work in some instances, but not here, for me).

[Timothy Verny · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection of stories!
Pete's stories are about loss, about families, and about optimism.
His characters are staying with me even after the pages are turned.

[Weiling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Twelve loosely connected short stories of the silent sufferings of Asian/Americans make up Pete Hsu's debut story anthology. In a style resembling Anthony Veasna So's Afterparties, Hsu attends to the multigenerational sorrow and care in the East Asian American diasporas in California. Stirring and disturbing the "model minority" myth, the stories share the inevitable pain, trauma, and uncertainties of immigrant lives that play cards with fates. Instead of sitting in school getting straight A's, they find themselves wrapped in uneven lots of survival in the biases against queer sexuality, racist aggression, infidelity covered under Christianity, gun violence, the HIV/AIDS epidemics, illegal crossing at the deathly US-Mexico border, and so on. One moment these antiheroes are out and about, the next they may perish. Occasionally, fate flips to show a more favorable side. These stories are at once individual and barely connected, and collective and common.

Ostensibly absent across these stories is an intact nuclear family. A deceased mother, a vanished father, or a broken marriage brings in surrogate caretakers: sometimes an aging grandfather, and at other times, an ex-stepfather. Not entirely lost or sheltered, the characters drift in the sea of loneliness and alternately feel the warm currents or biting cold torrents of human contact. Instead of giving these vignettes a settled ending, Hsu intentionally offers an "unending," cutting many of them at critical turning point and letting the suspended plot bleed into the reader's imagination. In other stories, he leaves behind a faint, rescued belief in bonding. Relationships that have been transient and unsteady are shown the path toward permanence, though the wounds also carry on.

The story collection spins out the narrative arcs around a few recurring characters that loosely wire new characters into the loop without following a linear line of plot. Commonly seen in literature of fragmented lives, this postmodern writing style is capable of linking randomness with commonality, of recognizing someone in anyone, and of connecting dots to draw a web. The linkage passes down to later generations not necessarily through family ties, but the broader diasporic community. It is particularly helpful to portray "Asian American" not as a homogeneous entity with fixed boundary, but rather as a fluid and porous racial category constantly reconstructed by its intimate contact with other races.

However, the widely applied trying-hard-to-talk-like-a-dude speech style shared between multiple characters can end up hollowing out the richness of age, gender, class, and profession within the community. Is this particular speech style a common tool with which Asians with certain seniority of living in the US -- whether by birth or by immigration -- distinguish themselves from the newcomers? It may work well on certain groups, such as moderately educated (up and down college level) men who came to the US after 2000 and who see acquiring and performing "dude-ism" as a shortcut to cultural integration that can partially make up what being a minority cannot offer. But it would be a tightrope for other characters. Though informal, speech is no less an institutional disciplining than other formally institutionalized representational politics, which Hsu rightfully does not see as a necessity in literature. An immigrant character will gain more life if the narrative catches the disparity between native, fragmented, and learned speeches. That is what one hears living in California.

“If I Were the Ocean, I’d Carry You Home” being one of the stories’ title, it is not immediately clear how, and to what extent, the ocean cohesively represents the overall commonality. An ungrounded guess would be the connection between the ocean and transpacific Asian immigration that brought Hsu’s antiheroes to the California coast. “Ocean” is the metaphor of flotsam-like diaspora, of dispersed life from which the bond with the homeland is always unstable and fragmented. But still, it would be more satisfactory to see that when the stories communicate between themselves, they actually revolve around the ocean, either as a metaphor or a matter.

[Tim Cummings · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful and poignant collection of short stories, loosely interconnected, about family, friendships, childhood, and faith. Hsu's prose is remarkable, and remarkably succinct. I loved following the bizarre narrative arc of the character Reggie, who appears in several stories. We meet him as a boy who is unable to defend his little brother at a party for wanting to wear a dress. But at the end of the collection he is an old man mired by guilt and shame and confronted by a hideous futuristic contraption that threatens to rob us all of our innermost selves and secrets. I loved the story called ASTRONAUTS about a human smuggling operation that both shocked and broke me. And perhaps my favorite story, KING KONG KORAB, a truly touching and insightful meditation on AIDS and basketball, which seem like two unlikely bedfellows...though there is mention of Magic Johnson, and it does take place in 1991. Also, this is a compelling and intimate glimpse into Asian and Asian-American communities in Los Angeles. A delightful and contemplative read for anyone who loves short story collections.

[Unicornsparkles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pete Hsu does an outstanding job of creating stories that reflect the essence of violence in the lives of young people. Each story is unique with its plot, but nonetheless shares the same ideal of trauma and how it can emotionally affect victims of such events. These stories are disturbing narratives of children who had to navigate through instances of survival in their homes and society, often encountering violence and even death.

Throughout the reading, we gain an understanding of the perspective of each narrator and witness an intimate view of their traumas. As readers, we’re able to reflect upon their journey of trying to fit in to a world that’s created a crippling fear and unsettling reality upon them.

The imagery, underlying humor, and vivid detail that Hsu utilizes throughout the book really captures the mind of the reader and allows for the voices of the narrators to stick with us on a different level.

[Daniel Chi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The collection of short stories works and like some other reviews have said, provides a level of instability. But ultimately, the loose connections between the different stories add a level of depth, making me want to go in for another dive and observe the characters within the text a bit more.

Reggie's story continually bounces from him suffering uncontrollably from the world around him and making mistakes that seemingly alter the steadiness in his life. In one of the stories, the line "Asians always suffer in silence", echoes loudly when thinking about the endeavors our characters face.

Overall, a wonderful read :)

[Toni Ann Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, heartfelt collection with stories of childhood trauma that I did not stop thinking about. Though the subject matter is often filled with suspense and/or painful element, Pete Hsu offsets this with moments of humor and exquisitely gorgeous writing that make this book a stunning read.

[Gina Salvatore · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this short story collection at the Miami Book Fair, entranced by its title. The stories were heartfelt and profound, and weaved together beautiful narratives of experience through all the different protagonists. The title story was especially poignant, and each story in some way or other was about unconditional love- when it was present, and when it was conspicuously absent also.