“Bodies don’t really trifle with such questions.”

What Bonnie Chau Thinks About Often:
Conceptual Erotica
Lenticular Pictures
Chaparral
Word Banks
Love Letters

I could see Bonnie Chau from the corner as I walked up to China Blue. She was leaning against the wall, smoking. A downpour had just slowed, breaking up the humid August day. We walked inside the restaurant together, Chau leading the way to a private side room she’d arranged for us to use. The space was palatial, with bookshelves lining the entrance, and when we stopped at the bar, I noticed all the cocktails on the menu were named after films by Wong Kar-wai. His films also come up in Chau’s debut collection, All Roads Lead to Blood, with one narrator saying, “Those movies were all about love, how it was never aligning quite right, even though we’ve been trying for eons.”

The young women of Chau’s collection have also been trying for eons, and for them, too, love doesn’t align quite right. In these sixteen stories, women encounter and confront ghosts, wolves, jellyfish, men, history, family, themselves. They myth-make and they fight to avoid the traps of myths made for them by others. Chau’s stories thrive on the level of the sentence, swerving and escalating and brimming as she wills them. In her hands, even the typically clichéd language around romance—such as, “crush,” “breakup,” “fling,”  “do it,” “dream of”—becomes a new site for not aligning quite right, for riffing, as assistants are caught “mingling their fucking hearts out” and a narrator insists that “settling down is what pilgrims and pioneers do.” 

Chau talks as she writes, doubling back, adding to her thoughts, negating and then reaffirming in the same breath, her deadpan delivery often undercut by laughter. She describes herself here as both “very loyal and very contrarian,” and this was what drew me to her from our very first conversation—a conversation that played a key role in my decision to move from California to New York. Our interview went on into the night and was interrupted only by the owners of the restaurant, Xian Zhang and Yiming Wang, who seemed to want to make sure I understood I was in the company of a legend. They told me stories of Chau saving the night by recognizing Salman Rushdie dining at their sister restaurant where she worked, and of her writing the script for the ghost story episode of the restaurant’s SinoVision TV show. As we prepared to walk toward the subway, just about the last ones in the restaurant, Chau suggested the owners use the room we’d been speaking in as a writer’s residency...