Delia Cai

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 Novel

Central Places

If I’m not careful, I’m going to turn into my fucking mother. 

Wouldn’t it have been funny, to be on the other side mistaking one white girl for another?

My parents lived their lives here so afraid of everything. Why on earth did I ever want to come back and be reminded of all that?

We were learning about the New Testament in youth group that year, and I remember being annoyed that even God seemed to get over things faster than my mother. 

I was always trying to lose this place; I just hadn't realized what it would mean once I did. 

But it turns out that my parents have no use for my warped sense of duty. After all this time, they didn’t actually want me back. 

And then my mother says, “I miss you too, my xin gan,” using that old Mandarin phrase for darling, which means “my heart and my liver,” “my everything.”

Central Places quotes

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