Fiction. Following the acclaimed Hawaiian Cowboys, Chinese-American writer John Yau's second book of short fiction returns to the same bleak neighborhoods of casual misunderstanding, habitual deception and oblique, transient encounters among strangers. At the heart of Yau's inquiry once again is that precarious and unstable thing identity, this time fathomed in primarily sexual terms as if in evolution from Hawaiian Cowboy's earlier casting of a shattered multiplicity into its racial components. Yau lives and works in New York City. 204pp. Black Sparrow 1998.