We Two Alone

Praised as “utterly remarkable” and “deeply resonant” by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Viet Thanh Nguyen and Robert Olen Butler, a bold and brilliant debut collection, in the vein of The Refugees, which dramatizes the Chinese diaspora across the globe over the past hundred years.
Set on five continents and spanning decades, We Two Alone traces the arc and evolution of the Chinese immigrant experience. A young laundry boy risks his life, pretending to be a girl to play organized hockey in Canada in the 1920s. A Canadian couple is caught when Shanghai succumbs to violence during the Second Sino-Japanese War. A family sttempts to buy a home in South Africa in the early years of apartheid. An actor in New York struggles to keep his career alive while yearning to reconcile with his estranged wife.
From the vulnerable and disenfranchised to the educated and privileged, the characters in this extraordinary collection embody the diversity of the Chinese diaspora past and present. In these deeply affecting stories, Jack Wang subverts expectations as he captures the hope, pain, and sacrifices of the millions who journey into the unknown to create better lives, and explores the shifting boundaries of morality, the intimacies and failings of love, and the choices circumstances force us to make.

Jack Wang is the author of the story collection We Two Alone, winner of the 2021 Central New York Book Award in
Fiction and the 2020 Danuta Gleed Literary Award from the Writers' Union of Canada for best debut collection in
English, shortlisted for the 2021 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and longlisted for Canada Reads 2022. His fiction has
appeared in Brick, PRISM international, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Humber Literary Review, and
Joyland and has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and longlisted for the Journey Prize. In
2014–15, he held the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich,
England; in 2021, he was awarded a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the
Arts; and in 2022, he served as a writer-in-residence at Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver. He holds an MFA
from the University of Arizona and a PhD from Florida State University, and he is a professor in the Department of
Writing at Ithaca College. Originally from Vancouver, he lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, novelist Angelina
Mirabella, and their two daughters.