American knees

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...

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