American Visa

Seaweed's story, from Maoist China to her New York emigration.

Publication date: September 1, 1994

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5

Page count: 172 pages

ISBN: 9781566890250

Wang Ping was born in Shanghai and grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. After three years spent farming in a mountain village commune, she attended Beijing University. In 1985 she left China to study in the United States, earning her PhD from New York University. She is the acclaimed author of the short story collection American Visa, the novel Foreign Devil, two poetry collections: Of Flesh & Spirit and The Magic Whip, and the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China.

“Wang uses the first-person voice of a young woman named Seaweed to tell of the depredations of the People’s Revolution. . . . She has mastered a conversational tone that seems graceful and effortless.” 

—Kirkus

“In these moving, heartrending stories, told with amazing honesty, Wang Ping has captured the immigrant Chinese experience. Seaweed’s journey from the emotional and intellectual wasteland of China during the Cultural Revolution to the anonymity and despair of New York is truly memorable. Wang takes her character’s dreams and delusions and renders them with warmth and humor.”

—Marry Morris

“American Visa is an astonishing piece of writing. Its direct unsentimental prose offers a portrait of Chinese family life and what is means to be a woman in China. As Seaweed moves from home, to a peasant village, to New York, we are moved by this record of suffering and persistence, of the desperate desire to move beyond the family and yet remain within it.”

—Colin MacCabe,The British Film Institute