Strange Horizons
That We May Live is a collection of seven stories of contemporary Chinese speculative fiction, each beautifully formatted, with an individual title page bearing a quotation from the story in English and Chinese. The works in the collection are not science fiction or straightforward fantasy but might be better classified as urban fantasies. Each involves characters surviving or moving through shadowy, shifting, and insubstantial urban landscapes. Even that categorization seems superficial, though, as I had difficulty plugging these surreal, stylized stories into any literary pigeonhole that made sense in my mind. Some of the stories in the collection seem to lack narrative cohesion, but that only makes the collection’s themes of rootlessness, change, and anonymity resonate all the more strongly throughout.