Synopsis
Transoceanic Lights chronicles the hardships of a Chinese family after immigrating to the US. The overbearing mother must reconcile the immensity of her sacrifice in the midst of a deteriorating marriage. Her only solace is the distant promise of a better life for her son, who spends his days in school longing for the comfort of his homeland. This is a novel about familial love and discord, the strains of displacement, and the elusive nature of the American Dream.
“Here they come, fresh off the flight from China: The father, Ba, the mother, Ma, and their only child, unnamed; we’ll call him Son. Son is 5, the same age the Chinese-American author was on his arrival in the U.S.; the novel has a strong autobiographical flavor.”
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Review
the novel has a strong autobiographical flavor." -Kirkus "Transoceanic Lights is perhaps the biggest surprise on the '5 Under 35' list, and it's the only book published by a small press. It follows a family of Chinese immigrants struggling to adjust to life in the U.S. The story line parallels Li's own history: H left China when he was five. Li earned a medical degree before publishing his first novel, putting him in the ranks of many other doctors-turned-writers, including Abraham Verghese and Ethan Canin." -MPR News "Ma's childbirth scene is a killer. The full account . . . should be enough to make any of us swear off having sex, much less fabricating babies, forever and forever, amen." -The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities "When Li focuses his narrative on the several tensions that threaten to tear the narrator's family apart, the novel makes for absorbing reading. Li also has an admirable linguistic command, an ability to spin out lovely descriptions and fresh, memorable metaphors. The precision and beauty of this description works on both sensory and emotional levels....a tender and persuasive portrait of Chinese-American immigration in the post-Mao era." -Pleiades Book Review "What Li accomplishes, as Lahiri and others have done before, is to put in stark relief the continuing social, emotional, and psychological consequences of the Faustian bargain struck when making the decision to leave one's country to come to another [. . .]. Li is not afraid to say that such bargains are not only fraught with difficulty, but also sometimes doomed to failure. Nor is any failure the result of some simplified notion of a lack of will to succeed (a quintessentially Western notion). Sometimes, the cognitive dissonance is simply too great to overcome - but, sometimes, the details are simply in the journey." -Portland Book Review
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