Women's Fiction
![Delia Cai - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_delia_cai.jpg)
Central Places: A Novel
"A sensitive, sharp-eyed, slyly funny novel of venturing back into the foreign country that is your past-and discovering that you can never really shake the places and people that shaped you."-Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts
A young woman's past and present collide when she brings her white fiancé home to meet her Chinese immigrant parents in this vibrant debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.
Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny central Illinois town where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fiancé. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she's become, from those she left behind.
But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Audrey's relationship with her parents has been soured by years of her mother's astronomical expectations and slights. The friends she's shirked for bigger dreams have stayed behind and started families. And then there's Kyle, the easygoing stoner and her unrequited crush from high school that she finds herself drawn to again. Ben might be a perfect fit for New Audrey, but Kyle was always the only one who truly understood her growing up, and being around him again after all these years has Old Audrey bubbling up to the surface.
Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey's proximity to her family and to Kyle forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she's worked toward and everything she's imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?
A young woman's past and present collide when she brings her white fiancé home to meet her Chinese immigrant parents in this vibrant debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.
Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny central Illinois town where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fiancé. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she's become, from those she left behind.
But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Audrey's relationship with her parents has been soured by years of her mother's astronomical expectations and slights. The friends she's shirked for bigger dreams have stayed behind and started families. And then there's Kyle, the easygoing stoner and her unrequited crush from high school that she finds herself drawn to again. Ben might be a perfect fit for New Audrey, but Kyle was always the only one who truly understood her growing up, and being around him again after all these years has Old Audrey bubbling up to the surface.
Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey's proximity to her family and to Kyle forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she's worked toward and everything she's imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?
Editorial Reviews
"A sensitive, sharp-eyed, slyly funny story of venturing back into the foreign country that is your past-and discovering that you can never really shake the places and people that shaped you . . . This book will resonate with anyone who's tried to navigate the confusing terrain of family tensions, lost friendships, or embarrassing memories of youth: in short, pretty much everyone."-Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts
"Delia Cai fully renders the uneasy marriage between past and present. Central Places is honest about the strangeness and revelation of returning home."-Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster
"An incandescent debut shedding light on old friendships, half-forgotten selves, and ferocious longings past and present, Central Places is a revelation, disquieting and so very moving, and dazzling with insight."-R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
"A moving, nuanced novel about race, class, and the unspoken power dynamics of an interracial relationship, Central Places negotiates the personal and the political with unsparing precision. Delia Cai has created an indelible cast of uniquely complicated characters. A spiky, intelligent narrator leads the story-readers will root for Audrey to win, even as her definition of triumph shifts with every chapter in this masterful debut."-Jean Chen Ho, author of Fiona and Jane
"Burns with complexity and compassion . . . A fiercely narrated and deeply affecting novel about imperfect love, the willingness to try again, and generosity―to ourselves and to each other. Audrey's unforgettable story of self-discovery will speak to anyone who has ever stood on the precipice of change, who has ever felt in between, and who has ever wondered if looking back is part of moving forward."-Elaine Hsieh Chou, author of Disorientation
"Delia Cai fully renders the uneasy marriage between past and present. Central Places is honest about the strangeness and revelation of returning home."-Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster
"An incandescent debut shedding light on old friendships, half-forgotten selves, and ferocious longings past and present, Central Places is a revelation, disquieting and so very moving, and dazzling with insight."-R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
"A moving, nuanced novel about race, class, and the unspoken power dynamics of an interracial relationship, Central Places negotiates the personal and the political with unsparing precision. Delia Cai has created an indelible cast of uniquely complicated characters. A spiky, intelligent narrator leads the story-readers will root for Audrey to win, even as her definition of triumph shifts with every chapter in this masterful debut."-Jean Chen Ho, author of Fiona and Jane
"Burns with complexity and compassion . . . A fiercely narrated and deeply affecting novel about imperfect love, the willingness to try again, and generosity―to ourselves and to each other. Audrey's unforgettable story of self-discovery will speak to anyone who has ever stood on the precipice of change, who has ever felt in between, and who has ever wondered if looking back is part of moving forward."-Elaine Hsieh Chou, author of Disorientation
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
The baby in first class is drooling all over his mother's sweater. It's probably rude to watch this happen without saying anything, but the thought of leaning over and telling a total stranger that her kid is ruining her cashmere while we're hurtling at cruising altitude somewhere above Lake Erie feels like an overreach. Besides, it's not worth disturbing the quiet hum of the plane, not when this baby-I think it's a boy-has been asleep since we left New York, and there's still another hour to go before we hit the Midwest.
So instead, I keep staring, likely thanks to that predictable late twenties biological pull, but also out of envy as I try to think of the last time I felt that untroubled, that indifferent to space and time and turbulence. At least the baby is one of those objectively cute ones: fat cheeks weighing down that soft, milky-pale face, lips scrunched in a rosebud, two ghostly eyebrows suggesting a strain of ancestry that my mother would be able to geo-locate immediately, in the way Chinese women always can, even when afforded only a glimpse through the rearview of whoever might be waiting behind us in the McDonald's drive-through with the same telltale nose bridge. It happened rarely enough in central Illinois that those moments of recognition always resembled a special occasion. From the folds of the baby's blanket toddles one thick leg, tightly furled like a drumstick wrapped with a little gray sock. Next to me in the window seat, Ben yawns awake from his grown man's nap. He follows the direction of my stare and nudges me.
"Hey," Ben says with a grin. "One thing at a time."
I roll my eyes, moving my gaze off the baby and down to Ben's great-grandmother's ring, which I slide up and down my finger again. It's turning into a bad habit. Ben had it resized over Thanksgiving, but I swear it's still loose, and I can't decide if I should tell him or wait until we're back in the city and take it to a jeweler myself. Either would be more useful than endlessly testing the drag of the band against my skin, as if I'm expecting the white gold to shrink down now that it's making itself at home. Even Zadie noticed this new tic the other day, when we were splitting the twenty-dollar hummus plate at brunch and bitching indulgently about how Williamsburg always got so overrun with German tourists for the holidays. "Stop messing with it," she chided, and then picked at her bangs so she could avoid looking directly at the diamond, like she still couldn't believe that the big E happened to me first. Here, inside the fluorescent interior of the 737, the ring wiggles over my knuckle with what feels like a promising amount of effort. But wasn't there some scientific explanation about how the cabin pressure makes your fingers swell or something?
Ben's leaning over me now to get a better view of the baby across the aisle. Then, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, he turns back to me.
"Ours would be like that, right?"
"Like what?" I give him a look. "Asian?"
Ben pretends to be offended. It's part of our ever-running gag, because of course he isn't making this about that. "No," he says, smiling impishly. "Quiet."
This makes me laugh. I say that I hope so, and Ben takes another glance.
"And a little Asian," he adds, completing the punch line. Because of course, he's a white guy and I'm the Chinese American girlfriend-well, fiancée-so actually, it's always about that.
I indulge Ben with an eye roll and watch him settle back into his nap with a contented grunt, like a whale surfacing long enough to gather oxygen and consult the scenery before returning to the depths. Of course Ben is unbothered enough to joke about babies and drift back off to sleep while I'm still gaming out all the possible scenarios for what happens when we touch down in Illinois, when the protective spell of our life together in New York disappears and he finally meets my parents. He's always been like this, not so much unconcerned by the nuisance of cramped seats and roaring jet engines and the future's greater mysteries as he is drawn to any open flame. Even the apartment Ben had back when we first met, the one right next to the aboveground train, recast adventurously in his eyes: When the J went clattering by, he had the nerve to emit these long, happy sighs about how it proved we were "New Yorkers, baby." After three years together, it shouldn't surprise me how different we are in that way: Ben has always been the seasoned ranger, fully at home in the city and its ever-present potential to turn any day into a personal sitcom episode; a hopeful romantic, buoyed by a belief in a welcoming universe; and the kind of guy who smooths a tense exchange in the Whole F...
The baby in first class is drooling all over his mother's sweater. It's probably rude to watch this happen without saying anything, but the thought of leaning over and telling a total stranger that her kid is ruining her cashmere while we're hurtling at cruising altitude somewhere above Lake Erie feels like an overreach. Besides, it's not worth disturbing the quiet hum of the plane, not when this baby-I think it's a boy-has been asleep since we left New York, and there's still another hour to go before we hit the Midwest.
So instead, I keep staring, likely thanks to that predictable late twenties biological pull, but also out of envy as I try to think of the last time I felt that untroubled, that indifferent to space and time and turbulence. At least the baby is one of those objectively cute ones: fat cheeks weighing down that soft, milky-pale face, lips scrunched in a rosebud, two ghostly eyebrows suggesting a strain of ancestry that my mother would be able to geo-locate immediately, in the way Chinese women always can, even when afforded only a glimpse through the rearview of whoever might be waiting behind us in the McDonald's drive-through with the same telltale nose bridge. It happened rarely enough in central Illinois that those moments of recognition always resembled a special occasion. From the folds of the baby's blanket toddles one thick leg, tightly furled like a drumstick wrapped with a little gray sock. Next to me in the window seat, Ben yawns awake from his grown man's nap. He follows the direction of my stare and nudges me.
"Hey," Ben says with a grin. "One thing at a time."
I roll my eyes, moving my gaze off the baby and down to Ben's great-grandmother's ring, which I slide up and down my finger again. It's turning into a bad habit. Ben had it resized over Thanksgiving, but I swear it's still loose, and I can't decide if I should tell him or wait until we're back in the city and take it to a jeweler myself. Either would be more useful than endlessly testing the drag of the band against my skin, as if I'm expecting the white gold to shrink down now that it's making itself at home. Even Zadie noticed this new tic the other day, when we were splitting the twenty-dollar hummus plate at brunch and bitching indulgently about how Williamsburg always got so overrun with German tourists for the holidays. "Stop messing with it," she chided, and then picked at her bangs so she could avoid looking directly at the diamond, like she still couldn't believe that the big E happened to me first. Here, inside the fluorescent interior of the 737, the ring wiggles over my knuckle with what feels like a promising amount of effort. But wasn't there some scientific explanation about how the cabin pressure makes your fingers swell or something?
Ben's leaning over me now to get a better view of the baby across the aisle. Then, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, he turns back to me.
"Ours would be like that, right?"
"Like what?" I give him a look. "Asian?"
Ben pretends to be offended. It's part of our ever-running gag, because of course he isn't making this about that. "No," he says, smiling impishly. "Quiet."
This makes me laugh. I say that I hope so, and Ben takes another glance.
"And a little Asian," he adds, completing the punch line. Because of course, he's a white guy and I'm the Chinese American girlfriend-well, fiancée-so actually, it's always about that.
I indulge Ben with an eye roll and watch him settle back into his nap with a contented grunt, like a whale surfacing long enough to gather oxygen and consult the scenery before returning to the depths. Of course Ben is unbothered enough to joke about babies and drift back off to sleep while I'm still gaming out all the possible scenarios for what happens when we touch down in Illinois, when the protective spell of our life together in New York disappears and he finally meets my parents. He's always been like this, not so much unconcerned by the nuisance of cramped seats and roaring jet engines and the future's greater mysteries as he is drawn to any open flame. Even the apartment Ben had back when we first met, the one right next to the aboveground train, recast adventurously in his eyes: When the J went clattering by, he had the nerve to emit these long, happy sighs about how it proved we were "New Yorkers, baby." After three years together, it shouldn't surprise me how different we are in that way: Ben has always been the seasoned ranger, fully at home in the city and its ever-present potential to turn any day into a personal sitcom episode; a hopeful romantic, buoyed by a belief in a welcoming universe; and the kind of guy who smooths a tense exchange in the Whole F...
