Eight stories may seem a bit stingy for a collection spanning 11 years in an author's career, but with Who's Irish?, Gish Jen proves that it's quality and consistency, not quantity, that counts. Jen's 1996 novel Mona In The Promised Land attracted a good deal of attention for the way it blended humor with an exploration of contemporary Chinese-American identity, and Who's Irish? displays the same ability. That may sound like too narrow a focus for a writer hoping for a wide audience, but Jen has the remarkable talent, possibly the most important for a writer of fiction, to make even the most specific situation universal. Adopting the perspective of a not-quite-sympathetic outsider looking in, "Chin" intimately captures the disintegration of an unhealthy immigrant family in Brooklyn while, toward the other end of the economic spectrum, "The Water Faucet Vision," one of the collection's most affecting pieces, explores the end of a schoolgirl's religious innocence and belief in a God willing to intervene like a benevolent uncle. "Faucet" also nicely displays Jen's ability to make hairpin curves from comedy to pathos, using seemingly offhand observations to capture the larger implications of what appear to be mundane situations. In contrast to the domestic tales that dominate Who's Irish?, including the excellent, novella-length "House, House, Home," "Duncan In China" follows a Chinese-American character who, after failing to make it in the country of his birth in the early '80s, returns to the land of his ancestors, finding a China still shaken by the Cultural Revolution but nevertheless host to the same unrepressed human hopes and failings he'd left behind. A morally ambiguous choice the protagonist must make secures the story a conventional happy ending, further illustrating Jen's mastery of the short-story form: Her tales build to moments of revelation that, even in their happy endings, find no decisive foundation. Instead, as one narrator puts it in an observation as wise as it is frustrating, they "paw down through one viscous reality into another mess."