Shawn Wong

"You won't even be Chinese after your wife's attorney gets through with you," Raymond Ding's attorney tells him after Darleen has filed for divorce. Raymond wonders if you can be a lapsed Chinese the way you can be a lapsed Catholic. After all, divorce is a number one failing for a number one son - who hasn't even gotten around to starting a family after seven years of marriage. What can Raymond say in his own defense - "I used to be Chinese, but my wife got custody of my ethnicity"? But extricating himself from wedlock is only the beginning of Raymond's problems. When he meets beautiful half-Japanese Aurora Crane, he learns that it's impossible to negotiate the shoals of modern romance without banging his shins on questions of race, culture, and identity he thought he'd left behind in the schoolyard ("What are you, Chinese, Japanese, or American knees?"). Equally uncomfortable with the expectations that family and society, Asian and non-Asian alike, have heaped upon them, he and Aurora try desperately - and comically - to fall out of love.

This anthology includes 30 selections from a decade of award-winning fiction. Since 1976 the Before Columbus Foundation has been devoted to the task of redefining our notion of "mainstream" American literature to reflect this country's multicultural, multi-ethnic richness and diversity. Since 1980 it has sponsored the American Book Awards. For more than a decade, the Before Columbus Foundation has been giving annual book awards using a single criterion: no matter who wrote the book, it qualified as long as the judges considered it "an outstanding contribution to literature." The result has been an eclectic yet consistently meritorious selection, as this anthology of selections from prizewinners suggests. What a way to observe the Columbus quincentenary - not with one more cloned commemoration of "minority" literature or rear-guard defense of the European-American tradition, but with a collection whose authors (Toni Morrison, Frank Chin, Jessica Hagedorn, Salvatore La Puma, Leslie Silko, Milton Murayama, and more than 20 others) represent the true American mosaic. Included is a full list of American Book Award winners and their publications that will encourage readers to explore even further. From Library Journal. David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee.