By Frankie Martinez
Cleo Qian’s debut book Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go is a short story collection full of both the soul-crushing realities of daily life and the strange questions that surface when reality gets turned sideways. Can one’s sense of sight change after undergoing double eyelid surgery like it does in “The Girl with the Double Eyelids”? How does a K-pop star’s plaintive performance in a karaoke bar somehow make it to the radio airwaves via a creatively wrung-out radio host like in “Wing and the Radio”? Can charmed personal effects, like those that Greta makes in “Power and Control,” help someone be more open to love?
While the answers to these questions are not always clear or definitive, Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go invites its reader to wonder about the possibilities, especially when it comes to modern technology. Qian’s incredible attention to location and setting, her impressionable, youthful female protagonists, and each open-ended, titillating finale make the stories in this collection feel like a waking dream, equally riveting and terrifying.
The settings in Let’s Go range from the mundanely familiar to today’s most exciting travel spots: the streets of New York City, the freeways of downtown LA, the suburbs of Japan, by the river in Shanghai. While I haven’t had the pleasure of traveling to every single location in these stories, Qian is masterful with the way she uses each setting to lend a discomfiting atmosphere to many of the stories in the collection.
A memorable example of this can be found in the title story, “Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go.” In it, protagonist Emi reunites with a magnetic childhood friend, Lily, in Shibuya Station in Tokyo, Japan. This feels like a natural setting for spotting someone long lost to the past—a bustling epicenter of culture and business, a place where many people might connect on purpose or by accident. However, as the mystery of Lily’s previous, mysterious disappearance from Emi’s life unfolds, the locations in the story become more and more remote, almost as if to mirror the mysterious nature of Emi and Lily’s past. Lily takes Emi and their friends to sequestered art exhibitions around Tokyo, which eventually builds up to a quiet, somewhat eerie hidden camera experiment in a house in the Japanese countryside and culminates in Lily disappearing from Emi’s sight yet again in the woods.
In addition to using the setting to help tell the story, Qian had me falling in love with each of her protagonists. There’s Nora from “The Virtuoso,” an eleventh grader who, after receiving second place in a piano competition, questions all the time she’s spent bent over her piano instead of socializing with people her age. There’s Aimee in “Seagull Village” who meets the only resident of an abandoned beach town in Japan. There’s Xiao Yun in “The Girl with the Double Eyelids” who begins to see strange images on the bodies of those closest to her following a double-eyelid procedure.
There are also many Lunas. There is Luna in “Chicken. Film. Youth.” who is forced to ponder her relationship with friends and lovers after a private viewing of an indie film. Luna in “Zeroes:Ones” who finds herself thinking about a lost friendship after receiving texts from a mysterious person she met while drunk at a club. Luna in “We Were There” who finds herself inexplicably attracted to an unavailable man while dating another who wants to take things to the next level. Luna in “Messages from Earth” who compares her life trajectory to that of a more rebellious childhood acquaintance.
It never occurred to me in my reading of Let’s Go that these may be the same character as it was never made clear by Qian, but perhaps we are supposed to wonder. While there are distinct personalities and desires in these stories, “Luna” can feel like the same girl if you close your eyes—aimless yet brave in her attempts to break the expectations set upon them by family or society. Luna feels ever-relatable, especially in her insecurities, missteps, and especially in her loneliness.
The collection itself has an aching quality to it just because of how isolated Qian’s protagonists feel. As if to heighten this further, the stories often have inconclusive endings that left me at a thrilling, climactic revelation for each main character—the stoic, hot aviator that N. passes every time she goes to work is actually a young woman, that friend Luna has been avoiding for years actually picks up the phone when she calls in a weak moment, when Aimee realized that the person she’d been living with this whole time is a ghost.
Page after page, Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go feels like stepping into a game of choice—the choice to connect with someone else, the choice to carry on as planned, the choice to stay silent. And while each story may seem like it has a set, inevitable conclusion, Qian’s dreamlike prose, unpredictable and relatable characters, and open-ended finales always seemed to leave me gasping for more.
Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go is available from Bookshop, Green Apple Books, Magers & Quinn Booksellers, The Poisoned Pen, Vroman’s Bookstore, and 27th Letter Books.
Frankie Martinez is a writer, reader, and editor from Southern California. Her prose has appeared in 3 Moon Magazine, Poetically Magazine, and The Winnow. She is currently a fiction editor at Miniskirt Magazine and has a slice of life column at The Daily Drunk Mag. Find out more at frankiemilktea.carrd.co.