"Constantly, they were in the process of becoming," a character remarks. That perceptive observation resonates throughout Qian's astute debut collection populated by disconnected young women in flux. Qian links four stories featuring Luna, who appears in the opening "Chicken. Film. Youth." as a 28-year-old enjoying Korean fried chicken with friends, whose dinner surprisingly morphs into a film screening with the restaurant's owner. In "Zeroes: Ones," post-college Luna is a writing tutor, eating Korean fried chicken mostly alone while texting a nameless stranger. She's back in New York in "We Were There," "passing through" lovers' lives. In "The One Everyone Knew," she's a teen discovering family secrets. Two stories feature Nora, whose boredom at work engenders a creepy hookup in "Monitor World," sharply contrasting her teenage devotion to piano in "The Virtuoso." Four friends embark on a mountain retreat meant to reveal "truth without artifice" in the titular "Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go." Qian saves the best for last with "The Seagull Village," about a young wanderer who meets the sole resident of a deserted Japanese seaside town.

Qian's bold and affecting debut collection explores aging, desire, cultural identity, and queer love among Asian girls and women. In "Zeroes:Ones," Luna, 22, struggles to reconcile her Asian and American identities while on a fellowship in Suzhou, China, where she nurses her loneliness by playing a dating simulation game and keeping up a texting-only friendship with a stranger she calls Zero-One. Performance and reality collide in the eerie title story, which features a group of 20-somethings attending a cultish retreat on Mount Haruna in Japan, where the characters' charged relationship dynamics come to a head, leading to an unexplained disappearance. Other stories delve more explicitly into the uncanny, as in the immersive "The Girl with the Double Eyelids," in which a teenager who's recently undergone eyelid surgery starts glimpsing imaginary symbols on other people's bodies--an enormous pink tongue on the back of her teacher's neck, a string of letters on her father's wrist--that she believes might point to secrets they're hiding. Throughout, Qian depicts with honesty and compassion her protagonists' complex inner lives, portraying people who are by turns thrilled and afraid, desirous and resentful as they grapple with the anxieties of growing up. This is necessary and poignant. Agent: Annie Hwang, Pande Literary. (Aug.)