Conflicting, overlapping accounts of Lena Wu — or someone who resembles her — appear throughout the patchwork of narratives, in the ultimate, goose-bump instance, impossibly cutting across generations. Here, we learn that the forthcoming text was a Chinese-language manuscript found among the father’s personal effects after his death. Given the need to travel to China, at considerable risk, through third countries, there cannot have been many such cases. Tasked by the father/manuscript author with producing a book on the circumstances of Uncle Rafael’s death, she embodies the blurred lines of literary fiction. In a lengthy passage from her short story collection, she recalls on the risks of writing during Mao’s crackdown on bourgeois elements.
