This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treasman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Wyke Wang read her story The Trip from the November 18th, 2019 issue of the magazine.

Wang's first novel, Chemistry, which won the Penn Hemingway Award, was published in 2017,

and she was named one of the National Book Foundation's Five Under 35 the same year.

Now here's Waiky Wang.

The trip.

In Beijing, he boiled the water.

It was August, so the hottest month of the year.

He put the water into a thermos and carried the thermos on a sling.

He called himself a cowboy because he thought he looked dumb.

Other people in the group carried a thermos too, though his wife did not. Their toward guide was Felix, like Felix the cat, Felix said, and he replied, okay. He had been to Europe before. The six-hour time change was fine. But when 13 happened, something yellow crusted around his eyes. The bus was air-conditioned. He dozed off, woke up, and by then his wife had finished

his cowboy water. On the Great Wall, he had to run since she was sprinting. She had come here long ago with a cousin.

She was trying to show him a specific spot.

This spot, when they got there,

was where she, admiring the mountains, had learned from her cousin the word for cool.

To not know that word, swang, until she was 13, did you know how that felt?

But you knew it in English, he weezed, no oxygen left. She made a face, they sprinted on.

The tour would take them through the big cities. It had been a gift.

Her parents divorced, said on separate calls,

we want your first husband to see China,

and have good memories from there,

...