Pangs of Love (Stories)

First published in 1991, Pangs of Love, at once darkly funny and deeply humane, remains a landmark exploration of intimacy, culture, and the quiet wounds we carry, from a pioneer of contemporary Asian American literature.

David Wong Louie’s debut collection of short stories explores love not as comfort but as tension—sharp, embarrassing, and often bruising. His characters, many of them Chinese American men caught between cultural inheritance and American desire, yearn for intimacy, approval, and belonging, even as those longings expose their deepest insecurities.

Across these stories, love collides with race, masculinity, family obligation, and self-loathing. In the widely anthologized “The Girl with the Pimply Face,” an awkward attraction becomes a painful lesson in power and projection, while “Dallas” captures the quiet ache of displacement and moral compromise in a life shaped by migration and unmet ambition. Again and again, Louie shows how moments of connection are inseparable from shame, resentment, and longing.

Written with biting humor and emotional precision, Pangs of Love portrays desire as something that unsettles rather than redeems. These stories reveal how loving—and wanting to be loved—can sharpen one’s awareness of not fitting in, and how the pain of that awareness becomes a defining part of identity.