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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN num: 9780385337908
ISBN number: 0385337906
Label: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Manufacturer: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 208
Printing Date: January 31, 2006
Publishing house: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Release Date: January 31, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 966569
Studio: Dial Press Trade Paperback
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Product Description:
The characters in Jess Row’s remarkable fiction inhabit “a city that can be like a mirage, hovering above the ground: skyscrapers built on mountainsides, islands swallowed in fog for days.” This is Hong Kong, where a Chinese girl and her American teacher explore the “blindness” of bats in an effort to locate the ghost of her suicidal mother; an American graduate student provokes a masseur into reliving the traumatic experience of the Cultural Revolution; a businessman falls in love with a prim bar hostess across the border, in Shenzhen, and finds himself helpless to dissolve the boundaries between them; a stock analyst obsessed with work drives her husband to attend a Zen retreat, where he must come to terms with his failing marriage.
Scrupulously imagined and psychologically penetrating, these seven stories shed light on the many nuances of race, sex, religion, and culture in this most mysterious of cities, even as they illuminate the most universal of human experiences.
From the Hardcover edition.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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The Train to Lo Wu contains story after story, on the challenges and hope of cultural disconnect. Row uses his language sparely, creating just the bones of each story, but while including every detail necessary to make the vignette impactful and real. Overall, this is a beautiful book, readable while being intellectually challenging.
Rated by buyers 
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Do not expect this book to shed any light on the culture and people of Hong Kong...
I bought this book because the stories were set in my hometown, despite the fact that I usually do not like short stories. I was quite disappointed mostly because the Chinese people depicted in those stories seem more alien to me than anything else. They were definitely not the everyday Hong Kong people one would meet. I felt that the the writer was still trying to portray Hong Kong as a mysterious place when it is definitely not.
The writing is not bad, but the contents and plots left much to be desired.
Rated by buyers 
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THE TRAIN TO LO WU is a collection of seven short stories, all previously published, and all ostensibly focused on life in, or connected with, Hong Kong. The protagonists in nearly every instance are Westerners - an American English teacher from an upper class suburb of New York City, a white female college student looking for material for a paper she is writing, a grey lawyer from Yonkers sent to Hong Kong to fire his firm's very first grey partner, a Caucasian photographer who has left his work-addicted Caucasian wife back in Hong Kong while he seeks meaning (and perhaps salvation of his marriage) at a Buddhist monastery. All are outsiders to Chinese life and culture. Some want to help, and others rationalize their behavior by convincing themselves they are helping. Some want to understand China, and others seek to understand themselves. Still others view Hong Kong as merely a backdrop (or a metaphor) for their own lives and their own ends.
Jess Row's stories deal largely with issues of identity and belonging, apropos of an island that is as much British as it is Chinese and is now a Chinese possession while trying not to be too Chinese. His stories also abound in cultural misunderstandings, the foreigners forever outsiders who apply their own world-views and standards, often with the best of intentions, only to find that they have hurt those they sought to help. Many of his characters are broken, either spiritually or physically, afflicted with blindness, spiritual malaise, and shattered knees, or, like the Lowenbrau beer girl Lin in the title story, hopelessly lost and looking for a purpose in life other than hawking beer and serving as a Shenzhen mistress for some rich Hong Kong businessman.
"The American Girl," perhaps the most affecting of Row's stories, offers a good example. Old man Chen, a blind masseuse with a modest massage business, is visited once a week by Jill Marcus, an American college student apparently doing community service work by reading newspaper stories to the old man. The story gradually reveals that Ms. Marcus is actually collecting research for a paper she is writing on the post-traumatic effects of the Cultural Revolution. Her volunteer reading is little more than a way to get close to Chen and learn "his story." Mr. Row's technique alternates between the interactions of Chen and Ms. Marcus and Chen's italicized recollections of the tragic events that led to his parents' death and his own blindness at the hands of the Red Guard. By the time Chen reveals the shocking truth, he knows Ms. Marcus's purpose and castigates her for her intrusion into his memories. "You are the same as them," he tells her. Of course, Jill publishes her paper and sends a copy to old Chen, who wants no part of it and tosses it from his window.
Row's engaging last story, "Heaven Lake," is the only one without a Westerner. Instead, the narrator, Liu, has been Westernized by attending college at Columbia University and subsequently returned to Hong Kong as a professor of comparative philosophy. His wife, whom he met at Columbia, has died of breast cancer, leaving him the single father of two teen-aged girls whom he does not understand. They are even less Chinese than he is, swallowed up in the worlds of Western fashion models and Japanese comic books. What the girls don't know about their father is a life-threatening experience he had as a bicycle delivery worker for a Chinese restaurant while he was a student at Columbia. Most of the story retells that harrowing incident, and then it's time for the girls to come home to supper and their old man.
THE TRAIN TO LO WU is a moderately compelling collection of stories about cross-cultural as well as interpersonal misunderstandings. They read quickly and maybe a bit too easily; what works well as a stand-alone magazine short story becomes rather less memorable when read as part of a single author collection. The stories lack a strong sense of atmosphere. Hong Kong is the setting but not much of a presence in these stories - Row's New York City in "Heaven Lake" is far more convincing - something of an oddity given the island's abundantly rich atmosphere (as evidenced in Wong Kar Wei's magnificent IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE). The book is also less enlightening about either Chinese culture generally, or Hong Kong's culture specifically, than it could be. Perhaps the reason is that, like so many Westerners who approach China, Row's focus is more on the observer than the observed. Whether this is its own form of cultural imperialism or Western narcissism is difficult to say. If Mr. Row's choice was to illuminate the irrepressible urge for Westerners to "get" China and their persistent inability to do so, in this at least he has succeeded.
Rated by buyers -
The Train to Lo Wu is a remarkable collection of short stories organized around the themes of Zen Buddhism, alienation, and wonder. Often told in flashbacks, these stories feature protagonists who find themselves in a crisis as they struggle with a recent loss (e.g. marriage, friend, artistic talent). These crises typically include sudden insights and dramatic changes in perspective as they try to find their way back to an understanding of the world and their place in it. Zen Buddhism is featured prominently in their journeys. The stories are wonderfully written, and include beautifully realized descriptions of the Hong Kong landscape and the people who populate it.
An excellent and thought-provoking collection.
Rated by buyers -
The title story displays the covert sensuality of a young woman in a society that does not recognize her value and does not provide much hope for security. These stories explore the territory of social morays when they collide with mass consumerism and the western world's influences on China. What happens when the West moves East? Within Row's complex narratives one finds that time in China moves steadily and lives vibrantly, that cities animate the structures on which they stand and that characters convey through the senses the social complexities of a place few Westerners have visited. As rare as such artistry has become, Row's stories carry one away to this foreign land and further into unfamiliar emotional territories. The internal landscapes are as rich and vividly alive as the descriptions of a China that is sensual, intelligent and exotic.
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