An inventor dreams of escaping his drab surroundings in a flying machine. A criminal, trapped beneath a frozen lake, fights a giant fish. A strange girl pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks.

All limn the frigid city of Shenyang, China’s northeastern capital, whose life-giving state-owned factories experienced mass closures during China’s transition to a market economy, touching off an array of social ills, from unemployment to suicide. Orbiting Shenyang’s toughest neighborhood, the singular novellas of Rouge Street illuminate not only the hidden pains of the forgotten but also the inspirations and grace they, nevertheless, manage to discover.

Excerpt

Mynah Snooker Hall wasn’t large, just a dozen tables or so, but the lighting was soft and it was pleasantly warm as springtime. There weren’t many people around, and beneath the lights, the neat triangles of balls looked like precious artifacts in some museum display. The boss sat playing mahjong on a stark white Apple iMac. When he saw me come in gawking at everything, he stood up and called out, hey, you looking for someone?

            – Li Gang. I’m looking for Li Gang.

            – Gang-san?

            – Thirty-something, quite skinny, tattoos on his arms.

            – That’s Gang-san. He hasn’t been in for a while. You looking for a game? He doesn’t do that any more, though he coaches from time to time.

            – I don’t play snooker. I’m looking for my cousin, we have things to talk about.

            He pointed at a girl on the nearby couch, and said, you should ask Mireiko. Mireiko, play with this dude for a bit. With that, he sat back down. I thought, who’d have thought, an actual Japanese girl. Mireiko was in her early twenties, and was wearing a dress and silk stockings. She put her bedazzled phone on the edge of the table, fetched a cue from the cabinet, and said, do you have your own? Her voice was pure Shenyang, an even stronger accent than my own. I said, I don’t play, I’m looking for someone called Li Gang. She said, go get one from over there, it’s eighty yuan a frame, we’ll play three frames to start with. I had no choice but to grab a cue. She let me go first, and I fucked it up.

            – You need to hold it further back, no point gripping too hard, you could splinter it and the ball wouldn’t go any faster. Let your arm do the moving, your shoulder is an axle.

            I tried again, and managed a decent break.

            – So you’re not Japanese?

            – You’re Japanese. It’s a stage name.

            – Li Gang is my cousin. He hasn’t been home for a week. I came from Beijing to look for him. I have to find him quick so I can get back to my job.

            – You think Beijing’s so impressive? Who’s family, your cousin or your job? Sink a long pot and I’ll answer your questions.

            I kept trying, till I was exhausted and sweating profusely, but couldn’t make the ball go in. She gave me a few more pointers, mostly about where to put my focus—seeing the ball as just a patch of white helped a lot. My glasses kept sliding off my nose, until she took them off me and put them on the bar. Keep going, she said. I finally sank my pot—the ball circled the drain before tumbling in. She said, good, now pay up. I handed her the cash, and she slipped it into one of her stocking tops.

            – Your cousin’s sick. This two hundred and forty yuan will buy him medicine. Prozac.

            – I want to see him. Where is he?

            – Don’t bother. He’s not coming back.