Identity and Self

The author explores notions regarding identity and the self within various narrative contexts throughout the collection. Ma particularly confronts these thematic explorations in the stories “Los Angeles,” “Oranges,” “G,” “Returning,” “Peking Duck,” and “Tomorrow.” In “Los Angeles” and “Oranges,” the first person narrators are particularly faced with the ways in which their former romantic relationships have dictated how they see and understand themselves in the narrative present. In “G,” Beatrice’s experience taking the fictional drug G with her best friend Bonnie on her “last night in New York,” catalyzes the dematerialization of her true self (51). In “Returning,” the narrator’s trip to her “husband’s home country,” Garboza, instigates her reflections on the ways in which her disengagement from life has dictated her identity and her circumstances in the present (88). In “Peking Duck,” the narrator attempts to reframe a prefabricated version of her...