A Review of Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua

Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, Vanessa Hua shares 13 stories that revolve around Asian and Mexican immigrant families in Deceit and Other Possibilities. Hua, the author of A River of Stars and a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has received praise and recognition for her writing, some of which are through the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature among many others. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, and in this reissued collection of stories first published in 2016 now featuring new stories, Hua once again gives a voice to immigrant families as they find a way to make America their new home all the while trying to hold on to their culture and familial values. The majority of the families are possessed to lie or keep secrets from one another in order to protect their family but sometimes only with their own best interest at heart, which leads them to acts of deceit. You’ll find yourself asking how far the characters are willing to go to protect the truth.

Hua does an extraordinary job at pointing to issues immigrant families face in America, many in which the younger generations who sometimes live in two worlds face all on their own. Identity becomes an issue that is mostly grappled with in the younger generations, those who were born American but raised with different cultural values. The collection of stories touches on both the older and younger generations to show the whole picture of a family and the ways they are able to survive together and as individuals. As kids it becomes our nature to want our parents’ approval, and disappointment has a major role throughout the book. Take for example the story of “The Older the Ginger” that show other realities of returning to a birthplace where you have been gone for too long that it doesn’t feel like home anymore and where people look at you differently. The main character is an older man who never married and comes back home to fulfill his mothers wishes of taking a wife. Then, we have the prospect of marrying someone that comes from America even if they are from the same birthplace, they have become a new version of who they were solely because they’ve lived in America. We see how they’re taken advantage of by family and friends. On the other hand, the character of Little Treasure also shows the extremes people willingly put themselves through to exceed in life, almost as if it’s for survival. Little Treasure and people alike represent that story but also how they view American life, and most times that’s in a fantasy land. America is an illusion to the rest of the world but that misrepresentation is only broken once you can see it for yourself. Yet, the possibility as the title of the collection reads comes head on through the intentions of the characters in this story and many others. Readers that have seen or heard of this in their own close circle will see this as part of their story, one way of honoring their truth and also showing others who don’t understand the struggles immigrant families face whether here or in their birthplace, the realities that live within them. Family is all you have and that becomes specially true when that’s all you have in a new place and sometimes that might feel enforced as if you have no option but to follow the example. 

It is difficult to cover all the realities Deceit and other Possibilities touches on and “What We Have Is What We Need” is one of the many true but sad realities that immigrant families face. The story is about a Mexican immigrant family where the father is the first to come to America, the mother follows at one point and then the oldest son, Lalo. There are two younger brothers that are left back in Mexico with family, an inevitable result of immigration where families are separated for one reason or another. The story is told in Lalo’s point of view where we see him first say goodbye to his mother and a few years later watch him make the journey on his own at age eleven. We see him relish in feeling like an only child when he reunites with his parents. “In America, I was an only child, and I liked having all the attention.” The separation of what was and what is, is a result of a new place to call home. This quickly changes when he starts to witness how that is also changing his family dynamic in America. As the mother starts school while working and taking care of her family, tension rises as the father starts to feel that he and Lalo are being neglected by other duties. Later they find that she had been lying about working late, instead spending time with an American born man who shows her a different future, one that her husband and family can’t provide. Lalo reflects on this when he’s older, “She had an alternate existence, happier than what she was born to, bound to. The perfect life that she hid from us, the one where she did not cry for her lost sons or get on her knees to clean toilets or argue with her husband. The life she deserved.” These revelations are brought forth and the family fights to stay together even if its not entirely what each of them wants. This is a recurring theme, the mother struggles between picking what could be the American illusion becoming a reality and the actual reality. Lalo and many other children are witnesses to the life choices our parents make for the sake of staying a family. It introduces a cycle, Lalo’s parents stayed together and he followed their dreams for him, “I got the desk job my parents wanted for me. It is my gift to them. My burden.” The character learns a lot, grows up in a unimaginable truth by being left behind, leaving his family behind, crossing the border, marital struggles his parents faced, learned street smarts, avoided gangs, and how you live your life for the ones that gave up so much for you. In the end he followed the American illusion his parents set up, and for him although became a reality, it wasn’t what he would have chosen for himself.

The collection of stories is captivating for its realness, a kind of story that although at times sad or hard to grasp feels close to your heart and one that can show Americans how sometimes even if dreams can happen, they don’t always come true for immigrant families. Lalo kept the picture of his mother that once belonged to the American man, which is how he and his father found out about the lies his mother had been keeping, unknowingly helping the man that was trying to win her over. “I keep the picture as a reminder of how that smile can disappear, if you take for granted what you can never possess. You must make her yearn only for the life she already has. To want nothing more.” The collection of stories offer an appreciation for truth, a way into the lives of those you see on TV screens or passing by on streets. Within each story we see how deceit can tear a family apart as well as keep them together. The character of Lalo, a young boy shows wisdom as he figures out how to adapt to life in America, a place that has given his parents and himself opportunities but also given his family many struggles along the way. He says, “you can never see all angles at once” and this quote provides an insight to the book as a whole. Hua casts a light on deceit where it is provoked by circumstance and consequences in Deceit and other Possibilities that surround the lives of immigrant families but does well to remind the reader that such things are true within any race within any country, birthplace or not, we are all same, human. In the end, irony rules as truth is centered around the stories told in the collection but it is also deception that is equally as important.