All That Work and Still No Boys

by Kathryn Ma

How do we survive our family, stay bound to our community, and keep from losing ourselves? In All That Work and Still No Boys, Kathryn Ma exposes the deepest fears and longings that we mask in family life and observes the long shadows cast by history and displacement. Here are ten stories that wound and satisfy in equal measure. Ma probes the immigrant experience, most particularly among northern California's Chinese Americans, illuminating for us the confounding nature of duty, transformation, and loss. A boy exposed to racial hatred finds out the true difference between his mother and his father. Two old rivals briefly lay down their weapons, but loneliness and despair won't let them forget the past. A young Beijing tour guide with a terrible family secret must take an adopted Chinese girl and her American family to visit an orphanage. And in the prize-winning title story, a mother refuses to let her son save her life, insisting instead on a sacrifice by her daughter. Intimate in detail and universal in theme, these stories give us the compelling voice of an exciting new author whose intelligence, insight, and wit impart a sense of grace to the bitter resentments and enduring ties that comprise family love. Even through the tensions Ma creates so deftly, the peace and security that come from building and belonging to one's own community shine forth.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

162 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

About the author

Kathryn Ma was born and raised in Pennsylvania, part of a large extended family with roots in China and the U.S. She attended Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Kathryn is the author of the novel THE CHINESE GROOVE (Counterpoint Press) and THE YEAR SHE LEFT US (Harper Books), a NYT Editors' Choice Her short story collection, ALL THAT WORK AND STILL NO BOYS, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was named a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Discoveries Book.

Author photo by Andria Lo

Reviews

[Elevate Difference · Rating 5 out of 5]

In All That Work and Still No Boys, Kathryn Ma writes short stories with one thing in common: the Chinese American experience in California. This book is not for those who like conventional storytelling. Each chapter is the story of a person or family, sometimes related to another person or family in the book and sometimes not at all. The stories jump through time and space—sometimes told in first person and sometimes in third—but each chapter brings a refreshing and unique look at the way different people deal with immigration, culture, and family.

It’s hard to write about what I enjoyed most in this book without going into detail about specific stories. I’ll briefly mention that I loved the grandmother, who is so dedicated to helping her aspiring actress of a granddaughter, and the overachieving student with a school prank gone wrong. With the grandmother, you see pride and dedication almost to a fault. The student, meanwhile, provides an unexpected spin on the stereotype of overachieving Asian student. These are a couple of my favorites because Ma breathed life into each character, no matter how short the story. I found myself connecting to some part of almost every story, seeing the weaknesses of the protagonists and sympathizing with the antagonists.

This is normally the point in a review where I would elaborate on what I didn’t like about the book, but there isn’t really much I didn’t like. If I had to offer a criticism, it would be that I find the characters a little underdeveloped and wish I could read more about all of them. I’d like to know how their stories continue and where they end up.

Admittedly, even though I love reading narratives that jump around and don’t always match up the way these stories do, it was sometimes hard to figure out what stories were actually connected and which were not. I look forward to reading the book again—not just to connect the dots, but simply because it was a very enjoyable read.

Review by Frau Sally Benz

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in this slim book center mostly around the intricacies of the family life and personal conflicts of Chinese-American immigrants, though a few of the characters featured have no clear markers of ethnicity. Many of the stories focus on fraught areas of gender relations and the relative value of "boys" and "girls" within family structures.

The title story focuses on a matriarch who needs a new kidney but refuses to allow her adult son (who has the best match for transplant) to donate, claiming that one of her four daughters should step in instead. Only sons are too precious to out in danger? There is a lot of fascinating and troubling detail about the "echo chamber" of comment and criticism that the mother carries around in her head - comments from other women that make her question her own value.

Some of my other favorite stories in the book have somewhat different themes. The best I think is the devastating "Second Child," featuring a Chinese woman going by the name of Daisy who serves as host and tour guide for (Caucasian) American families visiting China on "cultural heritage" trips with their adopted Chinese daughters. We learn about the circumstances of Daisy's birth and upbringing through her interactions with the only boy and only "white" child on the trip, the unexpected brother of one of the adopted girls.

[Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked Kathryn Ma's first short story collection. Her characters are funny, charismatic, deeply flawed, contradictory and do practically illegal yet completely believable things; They remind me of my own immigrant family. There's the soft-spoken woman who, during a disagreement, pushes her son down the stairs. There's the two woman in the nursing home who could qualify as frenemies. There's the stubborn mother who wants to take a kidney from her daughters, but not from her son, whose kidney is a match but body needs to be preserved like bad fashion to carry on the family name. The scenarious are all typical but it's the way that the charaters behave, written in simple, light strokes that is genius. The book's soft pastel cover with traditional icons is misleading. This is more than a book on people living with cultural traditions. Something about Katheryn Ma's characters remind me of Wes Anderson's movies; They are colorful grown-ups who act on childish impulses and misbehave towards one another, knowing that at the end of day, they will still be family and accepted for who they are. I like that the cultural context makes it more interesting, but it's the characters that steal the show.

[T.Y. Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is one of the few literary works about the Asian American immigrant experience that I could not relate to even a little bit. Of all the sets of characters in all the various stories, I was unable to find a shared conflict or common perspective, in spite of being "off the boat" myself. The core issues that I should have identified with, being family, race, immigration... they were TOO specific to the particular characters to be relatable in a general ethnic sense. I was disappointed. Kathryn Ma is a wonderful writer who can weave a story full of complex and interesting characters, but overall she fails to accurately voice the internal struggle of the Asian American woman.

[Dree · Rating 4 out of 5]

This excellent set of short stories focuses on Chinese-American women as main characters. BUT--in a few of the stories, this is not obvious in any way, shape, or form. Why? Because these girls are Americans, and live American lives. This is a nice change in the many, many stories/novels I have read, which sometimes neglect the fact that an immigrant's or a first-generation American's experiences will be quintessentially American in many ways. This also relates strongly to my own life, and my father's side of the family.

Thoughtful stories, funny, poignant, sad. Simple, yet meaningful. Good.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of these stories have a sort of curated feel—they're very clean, almost hermetic, and they feel very magazine-y. This is definitely the sort of thing that gets published in the New Yorker, etc. Which isn't a criticism, I guess, but the stories I enjoyed most were the ones with a little humor, the looser ones, the ones with some voice—these had a little more soul to me. Being a white male I have a hard time relating to the immigrant experience, though that's probably my fault as a reader. Overall a really well written collection.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've got a full review up on my blog.

Initial review:
I'll have a fuller review up soon, but for now I'll just say that I really liked it. It's not a good book to read if you only like linear, "traditional" stories, but if you like stepping outside of that box, I think you would enjoy it. More soon.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories, while very short, were incredibly powerful. Each one seemed to encapsulate an idea about being an immigrant in America, which was expressed so subtly that you only realised it at the end of the story. The things and feelings left unsaid were as forceful as the writing, if not more so.

[gwen g · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful stories that each give a slightly different angle to the Asian-American experience. I especially liked the title story, about a mother who needs a kidney transplant, and her four daughters and single son.

[Ivy · Rating 2 out of 5]

bought this book because i interned for a semester at the university of iowa press and remember the iowa short fiction award from my time there. there were some nice pieces in this book, but i found it overall uneven.

[Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess these are fine - I liked the stories with older women as the protagonists, because that's really an under-represented demographic. Ma does a good job with aging. And I think the title story is quite good. But after a while the Iowa Writers Workshop of it all started to wear thin.

[Anastasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid collection of well-written and interesting short stories, many with Chinese immigrant themes.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, rich, complex and different stories around the same theme. Kathryn Ma is a master of this genre in her description, characters, and diversity of themes. A must read!

[Liz]

Litquake09 author

[Ploughshares · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Recommended Books and Writers in the Spring 2010 issue of Ploughshares. Recommended by Laura van den Berg.

[Daphne]

a great debut story collection. Chinese-Americans (first generation and their children) navigating between tradition and change, West Coast and east, family ties and forging ahead.

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly closer to 2 stars, but I tend to reserve 2 and 1 star ratings for books I actively disliked. This one was just not my cup of tea. It's no wonder that it stayed in my "currently reading" list for two years while I never bothered to get back to the rest of the stories - even though it's a slim volume that should've been easy to finish in a single day.

Out of the 10 short stories in this collection, I only liked one. Kind of. Not for the content but just for the quality of its writing.

Most of the stories focus on family dynamics, often with strained parent-child relationships and the further complication of cultural differences - even within a family - based on whether they'd immigrated or were born in America. There's a fair amount of racism (White to Chinese; Chinese to Black; Chinese-American to Family/Others/Self) and solid explorations of what it really means to have a foot in more than one culture. A lot of that is interesting, and Ma's writing is sharp and ruthlessly honest.

Some of it felt a little clunky to me, with lines like "She tries to stand up to clear the fog descending" or "She used to enter willingly the echo chamber in her brain." But these types of heavily literary but ultimately meaningless lines did mostly get ironed out as the stories went on.

"The Scottish Play" was particularly good. Ma did an incredible job of writing a narrator who came across as a truly awful person: deeply selfish, massively judgmental, and really cruel to another older lady that their families assumed she would get along with, mostly because they were both Chinese. They did band together, briefly, in their dislike for a very racist white lady who was intruding on their Thursday lunches, but for the most part they sniped at each other with constant attempts to brag more effectively about their lives and their families.

I just felt so, so sad about the other lady in this story, whom the narrator treated horribly. So did I like the story itself? No, not at all. I found it upsetting. Which meant the writing was incredibly skilled and effective.

Most of the others didn't quite hit that level for me. A lot of them were pretty frustrating, with characters making bad decisions or being mean to each other just because that's more true to real life, I guess. Two years ago, when I set the book down for a brief pause, I wrote that I might just be getting over literary fiction. And I'm still feeling that way now, at least in relation to these kinds of gritty, infidelity-riddled, deeply unhappy stories. I also don't get the point of the one with the kind of out of nowhere incest.

I did like "Gratitude" quite a lot until the main character pushed her son down the stairs, simply because he was worrying about her. Sorry for trying to care about your aging widowed mother, I guess!! I get that the point of it was that these kinds of familial obligations can be a weight the person doesn't actually want to carry. But it was still a pretty jerk-level move on her part. I felt bad for her son. I guess that's a running theme...writing from the point of view of pretty dislikable people.

Glad I finally finished it, so I can throw it back out into the world for someone else to read instead.

[Neko~chan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I really enjoyed the stories in the beginning, but I feel like the stories later on in the collection lacked some of the spark. Kathryn Ma has this habit of dropping hints of a strange past, then working the payoff way later in the story so you’re on your toes, which works in a one off story, but repeatedly in a collection it gets a little grating. Especially if the payoff doesn’t come, either emotionally or logically (I’m thinking of “Dougie” primarily).

Still, I enjoy Ma’s writing and will definitely be on the lookout for more from her! My favorites of this collection were “Second Child” and “Prank” (I feel like Asian-American masculinity + race doesn’t really get discussed in literature a lot of the time, and I think Prank did this well).

[Kimiko Baylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories that made me feel things. Lines that struck and moved me. Of the 10 stories, I enjoyed 8 and found 1 unenjoyable (Dougie).