What can you tell me about China: A novel in stories
Abstract
We knew our luck couldn't last. Our father had just checked us into the motel, and I had barely time enough to set the antenna and scan the television, before the phone call came. It was evening, near dinnertime. Outside, other families who had arrived first were leaving the motel, all of them with fathers and mothers corralling two or more kids, sometimes a dog. They were headed out for a night in Fresno, perhaps dinner at a nice restaurant and then a movie or a ballgame. I knew from TV that these were activities families did when they traveled on vacation. I was ten that summer, Melvin, twelve. It was the year my father brought us with him on his sales route up and down Central California, the only time he would do so. We had pleaded with him to take us, begged for months until finally that June he gave in and packed us into his company-leased blue '88 Sentra with sealed boxes of merchandise stacked so tightly in the back seat we felt like bubble wrap. We had ideas, assumptions. We thought that we would be like those other kids at school whose families went on vacations to Disneyland or Yosemite. But they were vacationers and we were not.
Degree
M.F.A.
Advisors
Nguyen, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American literature
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