DISCUSS: Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou

A mail order bride from Taiwan is packed up in a cardboard box and sent via express shipping to California, where her much older husband awaits her. Two teenage girls meticulously plan how to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. An American au pair moves to Paris to find herself, only to find her actual French doppelgänger. A father reunites with his estranged daughter in unusual circumstances: as a background actor on the set of her film. A writer’s affair with a married artist tests the line between fact and fiction, self-victimization and the victimization of others. In these six singular stories and a novella that pivot from the terrible to the beautiful to the surreal, Elaine Hsieh Chou confronts the slipperiness of truth in storytelling.

(Goodreads: 3.81/5)

Author Interview: https://www.taiwaneseamerican.org/2025/11/elaine-hsieh-chou-interview/

*If you are doing the library's Branch Out Yearlong Reading Challenge this book counts in the Short And Sweet category https://guides.vapld.info/BranchOut