Where Are You Really From
Elaine Hsieh Chou
Hardcover/ebook
ISBN: 9780593298381
Penguin Press, August 2025, 352 pgs

A few years ago, Penguin Random House published Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation. That book received all kinds of praise, with sources ranging from Booklist to Vogue and The Washington Post. Chou has returned! This time with the collection Where Are You Really From. For many of us, the title will say it all. In fact, the title itself is great advertising: If you immediately understand this phrase, and you get it on an emotional level, then these stories will probably speak to you in ways that they might not otherwise. This isn’t to say that a broad audience can’t, or won’t, enjoy this book, because Chou’s abilities as a storyteller are sublime. But it is to say that the pieces often draw on and speak to experiences of discomfort and otherness. Yet she presents those experiences via an array of perspectives and positions, breathing undeniable humanity into her characters, and delivering surprise after surprise. I’ll share my thoughts on a few of the entries and let readers dig in on their own, especially because Chou’s narrative decisions are part of the joy of the journey.

The book opens with “Carrot Legs,” which was originally published in Guernica “in slightly different form.” The initial lines of “Carrot Legs” situate the reader in striking discomfort as well as irony, as the main character is visiting relatives in Taiwan and should ostensibly be “connecting with her culture” or some such but instead feels a sharp dissonance with everything around her. Having thrown the reader off-balance by dunking us in the main character’s sense of the strange, the author then proceeds to toy with us, both in terms of narrative expectations and in terms of emotional journey. Whatever you think is going to happen, it’s not going to happen; something else will happen, and that something else will feel both a bit surreal as well as making perfect sense. The confidence and voice of the writing are so good that readers might mistake this fiction for an autobiography. And sure, it’s not unusual for authors to draw from their own experiences. But please keep in mind that this is fiction, which is harder to remember when a writer like Chou can evoke both the unreal and the real so well. Unlike most autobiographies, where folks tend to try to paint themselves as virtuous and innocent, and, naturally, as the protagonists of their story, the protagonist of “Carrot Legs” is emotionally messy, complicated, and even unpleasant, which makes the story feel all the more honest. The little cruelties of life as a young woman, particularly as a misfit, are matched by the little cruelties of her interior life, and some might see her as a bully. Yet, I can’t help but feel for the protagonist, who is stuck in an array of uncomfortable relationships and situations and ultimately is just a young person who doesn’t know how to deal with what she is experiencing. As the story unfolds, and as we experience her complicated relationship with her cousin take turn after turn, there is a subtle, quietly building longing and desperation that traces its way through the narrative, which becomes a throbbing sadness in the reader’s chest by the time the story ends. In most ways, the story isn’t speculative. For me, it embodies the feeling of a speculative piece: an almost palpable kind of sensibility which I find hard to explain, but which I’ve felt in some of my favorite writings. The ending is wonderfully weird and fits the tone of the story, and perhaps veers into fable. Then again, if you want, you can take the ending to be literal, too. Either way, the emotions feel just as real.

“You Put a Rabbit on Me” similarly features someone who is traveling, but this time, they’re going from the United States to Paris, and hoping that the new environment will be an opportunity for a fresh start. Like many people in the US, Elaine is a Francophile, which, in Chou’s hands, is rich ground for an intoxicating story about internalized racism, layers of exotification, and all kinds of other delicious themes. Working as an au pair, Elaine quickly experiences strange and uneven power dynamics that can happen between an unsure adult and a confident, charismatic kid. Elaine is perhaps made additionally vulnerable by finding herself in a situation that is not as favorable and romantic as she had imagined. Despite all the circumstances, she puts her best efforts into convincing herself that living in Paris is still everything that she had hoped it would be. While there are some initial similarities to the first story, the author flexes storytelling skills by infusing each story in this book with a distinctive vibe, tone, and texture. One similarity this piece has with the first story, as well as some of the other pieces, is the acute sense of being out of place; yet the specifics of the way this sense feels are still unique whenever it’s present. Importantly, the way Elaine deals with being out of place highlights her loneliness and specific desperation, and even this desperation is a different flavor than the desperation in the first story, again making each piece an individualized examination of life, as well as of the way we move through life as humans. Because of Chou’s gift with story and particular focus, we can see that loneliness, sadness, and desperation can be things which are felt in very different ways, and that they can be experienced for superficially similar but ultimately vastly different reasons. In any case, just when Elaine is wondering if her mission to find herself is going to fail miserably, she runs into another person who looks exactly like her, impossibly like her, down to the placement of moles. Only, this version of her is French; she exudes what Elaine thinks of as a sort of quintessential Frenchness, all of which Elaine imagines as “elegance.” Unfortunately, Elaine has to deal with everything it means to run into what you essentially see as a “better” version of you. As the phases of what happens between these two shift into place, what underlies it all is reflection on the self, on longing, and on the way that strangeness can be what we encounter, but it can also be the result of our own decisions.

“Mail Order Love^®” begins as a sly, somewhat humorous glance at men and women, or perhaps at the male gaze, as well as the way men can kind of mythologize women. There is also an inherent positioning of power in the suggestion that a woman can be ordered by mail, summed up by the accompanying wink of the delivery driver who drops off the package. While it’s a very light touch in terms of the speculative, it works fantastically to do what the speculative often does: inhabit the uncanny, the strange, and in this way, allows us to examine what it means to be human in new and compelling ways. A woman comes out of a shipping box in a wedding dress, pulled out from amongst packing peanuts. Even the image is provocative, laying the groundwork for a thoughtful and unusual narrative journey. The man in question is seemingly innocent in ways, simply wanting companionship, which in itself should raise questions for readers about what innocence actually means when one person is purchasing another person for their own benefit. Does innocence actually exist, even if the person involved is relatively “kind”? Is “relatively kind” the same as actual kindness, let alone respect? The story details lend richer nuances, with layers of cultural elements and politics, perhaps highlighting the ways that changes in social landscapes often just mean minor adjustments to longstanding systems of inequality. Science fiction and fantasy are known to use exaggeration to capture what people really feel. A man who sees a person as a commodity of some kind is still objectifying that person, even if he’s nicer about it than some. There is also a thread here which I feel is important but I don’t see discussed as often as other topics, which is the assumptions people make about what is “of concern” to people from other places, and more specifically, the way these assumptions are imposed upon that person, rather than meeting an individual as an individual and trying to understand them as a person. We see this played out both by the man who has ordered the bride, as well as by the people the bride meets here and there, who are quick to render her almost doll-like by reducing her immediately to their ideas of who she is and what she must be worried about, exacerbated by the man’s unwillingness to even meet her halfway in terms of communication. It’s a beautifully rendered piece of weirdness which speaks more directly to so many frustrations many people feel from their encounters with so-called well meaning individuals.

“Featured Background” (originally published in The Atlantic “in slightly different form”) takes on the dehumanizing structures of the film industry, as well as the super interesting personal tactics some people may employ when navigating those structures, as seen through the working-class perspective of a guy who works as a background actor when he isn’t making quick cash as a rideshare driver. Thrumming through the story, there are messy interpersonal relationships: central to events is the working guy’s daughter, who is coming up in the industry as a director, but who has cut ties for reasons dad doesn’t seem to completely understand. Equally important are the shared or overlapping experiences of racism that many people experience not just in the film industry but in the US; as well as, perhaps, the consequences of internalized racism, or perhaps the echoes of ubiquitous colonialism (or both?). Fascinating characters, story details, and narrative directions drive the read as much as the subtext, making for engaging storytelling. Moreover, the tale explores personal relationships with identity-centered art in engrossing and fresh ways while also exploring the ways personal histories shift, and the relationship of those histories to storytelling and meaning. It’s another brilliant piece, nestled amongst brilliant pieces.

Honestly, it’s a ridiculous job, trying to explain a book like this. We can intellectualize all we want; we can isolate scenes in each of these seven stories, dissect and dive for meaning, and interpret through the inevitable lens of our own experiences. Chou gives us piles and piles of great material to work with in that regard. But I think the symbols and moments herein are best experienced emotionally as well. If, for example, you come across the visual of a man pulling a woman out of a box filled with packing peanuts, if in your mind you see she is wearing a wedding dress, perfectly polished nails, and a diaper to deal with the inevitabilities of a long flight in a box, and if you don’t feel both the humor and rage of this image, as well as feel the ways that it is grounded in horrible realities, then you just won’t get the most out of this book.

I know my genre community well. I can already see many of you out there, shaking your heads, saying things like, “We’ve seen doppelgänger stories before . . .” And that’s all right! Maybe this book isn’t for you. But not because of anything that Chou might lack. Chou has done marvelous work, and I really can’t wait for the rest of you, many of you who were probably in as soon as you saw the title, to enjoy what Chou has put together. You will love this book.