Excerpt from My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She said she was certain she could trust me with her story, and that I had an "open and welcoming face," which I must admit that I do. People trust me when they ought not to trust me, which these days is more often than they imagine. She talked about her and Victor Jr. 's visit with a relative in Kowloon, and I gave the much-expurgated tourist version of my own visits to Macau and Shenzhen, and how we were both heading back to the drab life of the US Eastern Seaboard. I told her I was from New Jersey myself, a few counties south of where she and her husband used to live. She asked for my email-I didn't have a phone anymore-and said she would connect with me in a couple weeks, when things got more settled. She didn't ask what I was doing out in this part of the world, which is just like Val. Since then she's asked, received my basic answer, and not mentioned it again. This is one of the many reasons I have quickly grown to cherish her. Val encounters life and persons as they come to her, this total acceptance of the fact that you're here, that you belong to the space you're taking up, that it's all and only yours. A rare thing, IMHO. If you think about it, most persons, including many of those who say they love you, can't help but question your particular coordinates in whatever you're doing or thinking or hoping for, then want to realign you to function more smoothly in their eyes and thereby calm their fretful souls.

Val's soul seems to me a crock of honey set on a warming plate, its flows exchanging imperceptibly from top to bottom so that there's hardly any gradient within, one example being that even when Victor Jr. is at his petulant, grating worst Val will bat her eyelashes twice, very slowly, while expelling the lightest of sighs, and then try to reason with the beast. Normally if her attempts with Victor Jr. fail she flags me, and I automatically fix us a snack. A couple Shin Blacks for us ravenous boys, grilled salami-and-cheeses. I watch him eat in his dainty Victor Jr. way, his thumbs and index fingers pincering the food, the other digits splayed out, and then wink if he's especially pleased. His micro-teeth furiously snip and grind and pulverize. Even if he was my own issue I couldn't deny that he might very well end up a charming and effective sociopath, one immensely successful, snarfing my offerings with warbles in his throat while picturing his foes and beloved alike in hot fat, deep-frying like chicken wings.

But at some point we're all extra hungry, aren't we, if not necessarily for grub? And if not it's probably because we've too much of a fill. Take me. I'm on the other side of feeling I was about to burst, having skipped out on this last semester to hit as many tables and stations and taps of life's grand buffet as I could, which I had no idea could be so available, so glorious and miserable, so heroic and lamentable at once. Sometimes Val senses me going funny and intuitively gives me space to sit by myself on our splintery back deck with a blunt, or to veg out when we're eating whatever we've ordered in. Sometimes Victor Jr. will bark at me, Yo, Tilly! Wake up! Val would likely have no trouble believing the things I've done and seen in this past year and maybe only wonder how I ever returned after being in so deep. I would say to Val that I don't know. I don't know how it was that I came back, because I didn't want to come back, ever, until I did.

Though now that I am back, I'm grateful to be with her and nobody else. Would I die for her? That's a weird question to bring up but I know I would. It doesn't mean I love her or value her most. I do love her and that's that but sometimes I think I love the world more. I'd die for the world, if this makes any sense, just because Val is one of the many remarkable phenomena in it. And this means I'd die for Victor Jr., too. Am I totally messed up? If you're willing to die for too many things, does it mean you care way too much or too little? Does it mean you'll break down very soon?

Excerpted from My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee. Copyright © 2021 by Chang-rae Lee. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.