Shanghailanders by Juli Min

This is a series of linked stories about Leo Yang and his family that in the end sum up to a novel. The time is 2040 and neither China nor America come off looking like they have advanced in the near future. The opening story has Leo has just dropped his wife, Eko, and two older daughters, Yumi and Yoko, at the airport and is returning home on a high-speed train to teenage Kiko, the baby of the family. The older girls are returning to boarding school and college in Boston--but all is not as it seems. The girls have each gotten into their own hot water that has consequences that are more a product of where they happened than that they are deeply troubling. The stories hint at things that are revealed in later stories, including additional characters, and there is a sense of sadness and foreboding that pervades the book, but also a feeling of not wanting it to be over, that there must be more to know about this time and these people. Delayed answers to questions create a sense of unfolding and revealing that balances the disappointment one might feel about leaving the latest versions of the Yang's, and their interesting problems, behind. It is an oddly atmospheric book, but then Shanghai has that complexity as well.