Central Places: A Novel

by Delia Cai

Overview

A PHENOMENAL BOOK CLUB PICK • “A sensitive, sharp-eyed, slyly funny novel of venturing back into the foreign country that is your past—and discovering that you can never really shake the places and people that shaped you.”—Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts
 
A young woman’s past and present collide when she brings her white fiancé home to meet her Chinese immigrant parents in this vibrant debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.

A HARPER’S BAZAAR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Audrey Zhou left Hickory Grove, the tiny central Illinois town where she grew up, as soon as high school ended, and she never looked back. She moved to New York City and became the person she always wanted to be, complete with a high-paying, high-pressure job and a seemingly faultless fiancé. But if she and Manhattan-bred Ben are to build a life together, in the dream home his parents will surely pay for, Audrey can no longer hide him, or the person she’s become, from those she left behind.

But returning to Hickory Grove is . . . complicated. Audrey’s relationship with her parents has been soured by years of her mother’s astronomical expectations and slights. The friends she’s shirked for bigger dreams have stayed behind and started families. And then there’s Kyle, the easygoing stoner and her unrequited crush from high school that she finds herself drawn to again. Ben might be a perfect fit for New Audrey, but Kyle was always the only one who truly understood her growing up, and being around him again after all these years has Old Audrey bubbling up to the surface.

Over the course of one disastrous week, Audrey’s proximity to her family and to Kyle forces her to confront the past and reexamine her fraught connection to her roots before she undoes everything she's worked toward and everything she's imagined for herself. But is that life really the one she wants?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593497937
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	380,086
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Delia Cai was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and grew up in central Illinois. She is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism and her writing has appeared in BuzzFeed, GQ, The Cut, and Catapult. Her media newsletter, Deez Links, has been highlighted in The New York Times, New York magazine, and Fortune. She is currently a senior correspondent at Vanity Fair and lives in Brooklyn. Central Places is her first novel.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

The baby in first class is drooling all over his mother’s sweater. It’s probably rude to watch this happen without saying anything, but the thought of leaning over and telling a total stranger that her kid is ruining her cashmere while we’re hurtling at cruising altitude somewhere above Lake Erie feels like an overreach. Besides, it’s not worth disturbing the quiet hum of the plane, not when this baby—I think it’s a boy—has been asleep since we left New York, and there’s still another hour to go before we hit the Midwest.

So instead, I keep staring, likely thanks to that predictable late twenties biological pull, but also out of envy as I try to think of the last time I felt that untroubled, that indifferent to space and time and turbulence. At least the baby is one of those objectively cute ones: fat cheeks weighing down that soft, milky-­pale face, lips scrunched in a rosebud, two ghostly eyebrows suggesting a strain of ancestry that my mother would be able to geo-­locate immediately, in the way Chinese women always can, even when afforded only a glimpse through the rearview of whoever might be waiting behind us in the McDonald’s drive-­through with the same telltale nose bridge. It happened rarely enough in central Illinois that those moments of recognition always resembled a special occasion. From the folds of the baby’s blanket toddles one thick leg, tightly furled like a drumstick wrapped with a little gray sock. Next to me in the window seat, Ben yawns awake from his grown man’s nap. He follows the direction of my stare and nudges me.

“Hey,” Ben says with a grin. “One thing at a time.”

I roll my eyes, moving my gaze off the baby and down to Ben’s great-­grandmother’s ring, which I slide up and down my finger again. It’s turning into a bad habit. Ben had it resized over Thanksgiving, but I swear it’s still loose, and I can’t decide if I should tell him or wait until we’re back in the city and take it to a jeweler ­myself. Either would be more useful than endlessly testing the drag of the band against my skin, as if I’m expecting the white gold to shrink down now that it’s making itself at home. Even Zadie no­ticed this new tic the other day, when we were splitting the twenty-­dollar hummus plate at brunch and bitching indulgently about how Williams­burg always got so overrun with German tourists for the holidays. “Stop messing with it,” she chided, and then picked at her bangs so she could avoid looking directly at the diamond, like she still couldn’t believe that the big E happened to me first. Here, inside the fluorescent interior of the 737, the ring wiggles over my knuckle with what feels like a promising amount of effort. But wasn’t there some scientific explanation about how the cabin pressure makes your fingers swell or something?

Ben’s leaning over me now to get a better view of the baby across the aisle. Then, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, he turns back to me.

“Ours would be like that, right?”

“Like what?” I give him a look. “Asian?”

Ben pretends to be offended. It’s part of our ever-­running gag, because of course he isn’t making this about that. “No,” he says, smiling impishly. “Quiet.”

This makes me laugh. I say that I hope so, and Ben takes another glance.

“And a little Asian,” he adds, completing the punch line. Because of course, he’s a white guy and I’m the Chinese American girlfriend—well, fiancée—so actually, it’s always about that.

I indulge Ben with an eye roll and watch him settle back into his nap with a contented grunt, like a whale surfacing long enough to gather oxygen and consult the scenery before returning to the depths. Of course Ben is unbothered enough to joke about babies and drift back off to sleep while I’m still gaming out all the possible scenarios for what happens when we touch down in Illinois, when the protective spell of our life together in New York disappears and he finally meets my parents. He’s always been like this, not so much unconcerned by the nuisance of cramped seats and roaring jet engines and the future’s greater mysteries as he is drawn to any open flame. Even the apartment Ben had back when we first met, the one right next to the aboveground train, recast adventurously in his eyes: When the J went clattering by, he had the nerve to emit these long, happy sighs about how it proved we were “New Yorkers, baby.” After three years together, it shouldn’t surprise me how different we are in that way: Ben has always been the seasoned ranger, fully at home in the city and its ever-­present potential to turn any day into a personal sitcom episode; a hopeful romantic, buoyed by a belief in a welcoming universe; and the kind of guy who smooths a tense exchange in the Whole Foods line into one of those odd New Yorkian friendships in under twenty minutes. It’s probably what makes him such a good photojournalist. Meanwhile, I’m the one who notices the noise and the disorder, the crooked picture frames and the monstrous train barreling by just a few feet away from where we slept—the trail greenhorn who catastrophizes for sport. The other night, I ran this self-­assessment by Ted, my boss, when we were working late at the Current office, and he said he agreed. “But it’s what makes you a brilliant sales rep, Audrey,” he added. “You’re ready for anything.” Ted said this nicely, like my ability to anticipate even the most demanding client’s whims without choking on the existential indignities of professionally asking people for money is the most impressive personality trait he can think of.




The only times I’ve ever seen Ben genuinely upset were during occasional incidents like the one earlier this morning, when we were waiting by our gate at LaGuardia. A young white couple asked if we would watch their bags while they hunted down the restroom, which I guess was supposed to be flattering, a coded acknowledgment passing among the four of us as we perched between a family chattering in Farsi and a group of retirees clutching monogrammed luggage. When the couple came back, Ben went off to stretch his legs and locate his daily iced coffee, like it wasn’t late December, like the looming enormity of the coming week now speeding toward us wasn’t enough to jolt him into consciousness by force. Whether out of reflex or the need to fulfill an ancient feminine custom, I struck up a conversation with the woman, who introduced herself as Erin. She seemed pleasant enough as she unleashed a steady clip of opinions about the morning’s traffic, the line at the Terminal B Starbucks, how glad she was to be getting out of the city for the holidays. As she spoke, she kept rustling her unopened magazine, which I realized with a flush of pride was the latest issue of The Current. I wanted to ask her what she thought of the big opioid crisis cover story, or at least watch her flip through the inside fold-­out ad, which I’d spent half of last quarter negotiating for the premium placement and right paper stock. Instead, Erin set the magazine down and began worrying over how the flight would dry out her skin.

“Well, your skin is absolutely stunning,” she said with a sigh. “I’m jealous.”

I could almost hear Erin’s neurons whirring as she looked at me, and I waited for the clues she’d been gathering—the shape of my face, the crease above the eyes, the unambiguous black hair—to finish processing. I knew that look well. This was another attempt at classification, not unlike the guessing game my mother used to play in the McDonald’s drive-­through, or the one I received in greeting when I started kindergarten at Hickory Grove Elementary and the ESL aide materialized unbidden to introduce herself at top volume. By this time, Ben had returned, slightly agitated because he hadn’t found coffee that met both his standards for taste and fair-­trade certification.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Erin finally said as she propped her black ankle boots up on the seat across from the three of us, “where are you from?”

Even though I’d known this was coming, the words bottlenecked at my throat. It had been a while since anyone in the tristate area asked me this, and I tried to think of the last diversity training they made us undergo at work as I searched for language that felt efficient yet polite. Erin seemed perfectly nice, someone whom I’d bump into while waiting for matcha lattes or ask, as we waited in line for the bathroom at a bar, where she got those booties. It was important to not embarrass her for no reason. But Ben spoke up first.

“Audrey is from the Midwest,” he said, leaning over. Ben’s face, usually so handsome with that aquiline geometry, darkened. “She grew up in Illinois.”

Erin made a hmm sound that I wasn’t sure if we were meant to hear.

Editorial Reviews

Delia [Cai] does an incredible job of capturing the complicated feelings that returning home can evoke—especially when an old boyfriend is involved. I love this intergenerational immigrant tale and Delia’s sharp social commentary about identity, and cultural differences. Delia Cai is an exciting new voice in fiction.”—Emily Giffin, The Today Show

“For anyone who spent the holidays listening to Taylor Swift’s “Tis the Damn Season” and brooding in their hometown . . .  [Central Places is] a Hallmark movie plot with a literary bend, and Cai’s musings on being a person of color in a small town add a refreshingly nuanced layer to a classic story.”—Buzzfeed

“ [A] luminous depiction of the complications of relationships with friends, old and new romantic loves, and immigrant parents.”—Electric Literature

“[Central Places] contains the very wit and insight that makes Cai such a talented journalist.”—Vulture

“Fantastic . . . This one will have you reflecting on themes of interracial relationships, growing up and moving on.”—Ms.

“A meet-the-parents comedy of manners! A town-mouse-country-mouse premise! A well-observed study of a provincial Manhattanite! Central Places has it all. It brims with charm, zippy observations, and the troublesome task of squaring who you are with who you were and who you want to be.”—Bustle
 
“An unflinching but warmhearted examination of a young woman at a crossroads.”—Booklist

“A sensitive, sharp-eyed, slyly funny story . . . This book will resonate with anyone who’s tried to navigate the confusing terrain of family tensions, lost friendships, or embarrassing memories of youth: in short, pretty much everyone.”—Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Our Missing Hearts

“Delia Cai fully renders the uneasy marriage between past and present. Central Places is honest about the strangeness and revelation of returning home.”—Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster

“An incandescent debut shedding light on old friendships, half-forgotten selves, and ferocious longings past and present, Central Places is a revelation, disquieting and so very moving, and dazzling with insight.”—R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

“A moving, nuanced novel about race, class, and the unspoken power dynamics of an interracial relationship, Central Places negotiates the personal and the political with unsparing precision. Delia Cai has created an indelible cast of uniquely complicated characters.”—Jean Chen Ho, author of Fiona and Jane

“Burns with complexity and compassion . . . Audrey’s unforgettable story of self-discovery will speak to anyone who has ever stood on the precipice of change, who has ever felt in between, and who has ever wondered if looking back is part of moving forward.”—Elaine Hsieh Chou, author of Disorientation

From the Publisher

10/31/2022

Cai’s uneven debut follows a newly engaged 27-year-old Chinese American woman who brings her white fiancé to her suburban Illinois hometown to meet her difficult mother and ailing father. Audrey, who works in sales for a magazine in New York City, reluctantly takes blue-blooded Ben, a photographer, with her to her hated hometown. Ben pushed for the trip, and he wins immediate approval from Audrey’s hen-pecked father, while Audrey’s stern mother reverts to her old habit of making Audrey feel like a constant disappointment. Ben does his best until a family night out at the Olive Garden, where they run into Audrey’s high school crush Kyle Weber, whom Ben talks down to. Making matters worse, Ben cuts the visit short after landing a plum assignment. Reunited with Kyle, Audrey thinks back on how they understood each other at their majority-white high school, as his mother is Mexican. Cai does a good job showing how Audrey was shaped by her mother’s disapproval, and there are plenty of engaging insights on race and class. On the other hand, the drawn-out passages on Audrey’s rekindled feelings for Kyle, which play a big part in shaping the final act, are a bit wearing. There seem to be two books at play, and one works better than the other. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

2023-02-24
A newly engaged woman’s long-delayed return to her central Illinois hometown forces her to confront the person she used to be.

Audrey Zhou, a 27-year-old Chinese American woman, insists that her first visit to Hickory Grove in eight years is her fiance’s idea. The Christmas visit is planned both to introduce Ben, a White photojournalist, to Audrey’s parents and for Audrey to accompany her father to an upcoming endoscopy. Shepherding Ben around, Audrey sees her hometown through his ever present camera lens. Returning to the predominantly White, Christian, rural town forces Audrey to confront her relationships with her parents and her fiance and her identity as the only child of Chinese immigrants. When Ben is offered an assignment in California and the postponement of her father’s procedure extends her visit, Audrey’s prodigal-daughter attempt crumbles. At the intersection of her past and present, she is left to contend with the collision of “new Audrey” and “old Audrey,” spurred toward self-destruction while uncertain which self it is she wishes to destroy. Ben is a familiar type of well-meaning White man, passionately addressing microaggressions on her behalf. His inability to comprehend Audrey’s formative years makes it clear that he is more of a character-growth yardstick for her than a romantic hero. The predictable plot—Audrey herself compares the reappearance of a hometown crush to a Hallmark movie—verges on dull at times. It is Audrey’s relationship with her parents, nearly estranged at first and then rendered through shouting matches and silences, that Cai has portrayed with tenderness and savvy. Audrey’s efforts to understand and be understood by her mother, whose approval she has always found unobtainable, nudge her closer to understanding herself.

Studded with emotional insights—a worthwhile debut.

Kirkus Reviews