The fiction of Chinese American poet and art critic John Yau is best understood as the transformation of a personal dilemma into a formal imperative; that is, his experience of feeling outside both his own ancestry and the American culture into which he was born has led him to produce a body of work that resists easy categorization. As he told Brian Evenson in an interview in 1998, "my interest in hybridity, and what might come after, may be due to that early realization that I wasn't quite this or that." Specifically, Yau's restlessness with fixed forms has resulted in his eroding the boundary between prose poem and short story, digging at it by turns from both sides until the distinction collapses. This attempt at fusion can be seen to its fullest extent in books such as Forbidden Entries (1996) and My Symptoms (1998). What these two books make evident, moreover...