In honoring ordinary people and gestures, Chang reminds us of things taken for granted, of cramped train rides and eavesdropped conversations, the sounds and smells of cityscapes and markets.

The white Liang mansion was melting viscously into the white mist, leaving only the greenish gleam of the lamplight shining through square after square of the green windowpanes, like ice cubes in peppermint schnapps.

Radical Taiwanese American poetry, Yasunari Kawabata’s final manuscript, a novel of the Sri Lankan refugee crisis, and more.