Love Me, Love My Dog: And Other Stories

The 14 stories collected in this book are about people caught in the unsettling dramas of Chinese society accelerating at a blistering pace in the decades after the Cultural Revolution, as can be evidenced by the titles of the stories: "The Evidence," "The Tenants," "Old Batteries," "Love Me, Love My Dog," "Buddha's Feet," "How Was Your Dance Today?", "Big Mama," "The Long March, Sort of," "The Girl in Blue Jeans," "Red Guard Fantasies".... Love Me, Love My Dog and Other Stories is based on an earlier edition titled Red Guard Fantasies and Other Stories (Long River Press, 2007), which has won praises from acclaimed fiction writers such as Gloria Frym, author of Distance No Object and Homeless at Home: "Qi's stories of post-Cultural Revolution China gloriously join the lineage of Chekhov. With unadorned prose and utmost compassion... Red Guard Fantasies offers glimpses of How to Be Chinese now that instructions from the Little Red Book no longer apply." Daniel Asa Rose, author of Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust: "By turns tender and chilling, these elegant and deeply knowing tales linger in the mind."Witty, poignant, absurd, and shocking, Love Me, Love My Dog stories offer a telling depiction of the myriad world of jaded entrepreneurs, overzealous cops, karaoke fanatics, dog lovers (and haters), liberated coeds, and frustrated urbanites who move in and out of China's colorful neon-lit cites and dusty rural villages, transitioning from one world to the other.