My Dear You
by Rachel Khong
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Where to Purchase Bookshop.org | Amazon
Happy Pub Week to My Dear You by Rachel Khong! 🎉
This book was gifted to me by the publisher. All thoughts are my own.
Knopf | April 7, 2026
What a way to begin a story collection. You have just been eaten by a crocodile on your honeymoon in Australia. Now you are in heaven, and you get to choose your face. People whose faces are maimed in death get to pick a new one, the narrator explains brightly, and in heaven, everyone is smoking hot. That is the energy of My Dear You, Rachel Khong's debut short story collection, and it arrived in the mail just days before its pub date. It was exactly the right read after the weight of the last book I read.
Khong is already the author of the New York Times bestsellerReal Americans and Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction. I have not read either of those yet. My first experience with her writing was through this book, and now I need both of them immediately.
What It's About
This book is made up of ten stories that use elements of the fantastical and the absurd to comment on contemporary life. Khong's main characters are largely Chinese or Chinese American women grappling with how to distill their own wants from what society expects of them. The premises range from quietly surreal to fully speculative. The government injects all citizens with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. God does away with humans in favor of something much better. A woman adopts a cat who conjures the ghosts of her ex-loves.
Ultimately, the stories are about love in its most ordinary and most impossible forms: being in it, missing it, not recognizing it until it is gone.
What Stuck With Me
My favorite story is the title piece, "My Dear You." That heaven narrative pulls you in with humor and then does something both tender and heartwrenching with it before the last page. The final story, "D Day," closes the collection with the same balance of wit and ache that runs through everything here.
But what I keep thinking about is what Khong does across the whole collection with the question of identity. These characters are constantly being asked, in one way or another, to become someone else: to be perceived differently, to perform differently, to want differently. The speculative premises are the argument. Each story asks what it means to be an Asian woman in America, or an American, or a human. She just asks it through a cat that summons ghosts, or a government program, or a factory worker and a sex doll who become something like friends.
My Takeaway
Khong holds all of these issues up to the light and lets you see them more clearly than you did before.
If you are new to Asian American literary fiction, this is a wonderful place to start. If you already love the genre, this book is definitely worth the read.
Read it in pieces. Make sure to think about each story before you move to the next one.
Where to Purchase Bookshop.org | Amazon
If you liked this, you might also enjoy:
Where Are You Really From by Elaine Hsieh Chou: sharp, satirical, and unafraid to be funny about the things that hurt, Chou's fiction shares Khong's gift for using absurdist premises to cut straight to the bone of identity and belonging.
Patchwork Dolls by Ysabelle Cheung: intimate and formally inventive, Cheung's work inhabits the same territory of Asian womanhood, memory, and self-making that runs through every story in this collection.
I received a physical copy of this book from Knopf in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through my link, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to books I have read and recommend. All books mentioned in this post can be found in my storefront.
