The Price of Tea in China

By E. Shaskan Bumas

With the practiced eye of a traveler at large, E. Shaskan Bumas portrays characters struggling to define their relationships to each other and to their time. Whether scientists or artisans, punks or new-agers, single mothers or students, activists or children in harm's way, Bumas's characters fill these stories with heart and subversive humor. The Price of Tea in China depicts places as far-flung as a Manhattan ghetto and a provincial Chinese city through an exploration of human relationships that makes each location both foreign and familiar. In "Flag of Fire," an American teacher becomes caught up in the lives of students engaged in China's pro-democracy movement. "Your Cordially Requested Presence" reveals a man's humorous sufferings as he acts the part of fiance for a lesbian friend at her cousin's wedding. "The Attraction to Gravity" brings us a young man whose growing appreciation of his girlfriend's small daughter is threatened by her father's reappearance. In "Cupid's Carriers," a student chronicles college life in the era of punk rock through a journal that takes on a life of its own. In "Emerging," a neighborhood's web of its inhabitants is torn apart by a police riot, and in "Spare the Child," a man describes the unplanned pregnancy of his girlfriend with biting dislike.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870239309
• ISBN13: 9780870239304
• Release Date: February 1995
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Lovely stories.

E. Shaskan Bumas, The Price of Tea in China (University of Massachusetts, 1995) Bumas seems to have fallen off the face of the planet since publishing his first, and to date only (that I can find, anyway), short story collection in 1995. This is quite depressing, as the nine stories in The Price of Tea in China are the work of a skilled writer. They do sometimes show the problems one would expect from a neophyte-- the pace lags at times, they get verbose at others-- but for the most part, this is an excellent collection, well worth looking into if you're a fan of the realist short story. The best of the stories, perhaps (though by a long nose at most) is "Your Cordially Requested Presence," about a straight man who accompanies a lesbian friend to a wedding so she can fend off questions about her sexuality; as the two of them get more inebriated, the façade gets harder and harder to pull off, until finally there's a confrontation with the bride and groom. Excellently done. I'd list the other good stories in here, but I'd just be repeating the table of contents; this book deserves a much wider audience than it's had to date. ****

Winner, Associated Writing Program's Award for Short Fiction

E. Shaskan Bumas is a politically complex author: who else would write a story where a character politicizes house plants? Although well read (I'd guess that his favorite book is Finnegan's Wake), the author is unlikely to stand by and simply see how events unfold. He doesn't take himself seriously, but he does take life and writing seriously, and he reads significance into everything. The Price of Tea in China (winner of the Associated Writing Program's Award for Short Fiction and Southwest Review's McGinnis award for fiction) is a unique collection of eight stories. The characters who inhabit these stories are modern urbanites whose relationships are, ahem, untraditional. Their eclectic interests range from French literary theory to punk rock to Christo. We peek into their lives during college, divorce, weddings, and the Tiananmen Square uprising. These stories are cities of invention. Here, the reader comes and goes, sauntering down the leafy avenues, scurrying through the horrider slums. Critics are mere bus drivers here. C'mon, take a ride.