Foreign Ground

The people in these eight stories all travel across the divide between the familiar and the foreign. For some it is a geographical journey, for others it's psychological. In most it's both. In this arresting collection, a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution arrives forty years later at a U.S. university, where his ability to teach in English is tested. A small town's butterfly sanctuary conjures for an old woman disturbing memories of the Mayan ruins at Tikal and the civil war in Guatemala. A German bride makes the crossing from the smoke-stained city of her birth to the presumed paradise of 1913 Honolulu. A young family from the green farmland of the Midwest becomes lost in the arid mountains of New Mexico. A child raised in the shadow of Buchenwald ends up as a soldier in the jungles of Vietnam. These and other stories evoke a keen empathy with characters caught in confounding circumstances.