First published in 1991, Pangs of Love remains a landmark exploration of intimacy and culture, from a pioneer of contemporary American literature.
In his unforgettable debut Pangs of Love, David Wong Louie follows Chinese American men and women who are caught between cultural inheritance and longing, searching for a sense of purpose and acceptance and identity even as their deepest desires awaken the fears that threaten to keep them from it.
These stories bring love into collision with race, masculinity, and family expectations. In the widely anthologized “Displacement,” an immigrant woman whose intelligence and history remain unseen by those around her confronts the quiet humiliations of exile, class, and invisibility until even her cherished rituals can no longer offer escape. Elsewhere, the Great Wall of China becomes the backdrop for an imperial baseball game, and a young woman struggles to imagine a future beyond her family’s inheritance of loss.
Pangs of Love announced a writer of remarkable emotional intelligence and range. With wit and extraordinary psychological insight, Louie captures the costs of wanting to be seen and the lasting marks left by love in a world that never fully makes room for you.
