"There is perhaps no voice better suited to tell the stories of contemporary China's conflicted, layered reality. China is at once a very young and a very old country, and as much guided by revolutionary fervor as by the heavy memories of history. Where the techniques of literary realism often seem powerless before the many contradictions of the country's headlong plunge into uneven development, Xia Jia has discovered a way to use speculative fiction, with its rich semantic web of fantastic metaphors, derived from both the language of magic and science, to convey the psychological truth of being Chinese at this moment."--Ken Liu, from the Introduction