Life in a foreign country often takes on a dreamlike quality, where everything is cast in a slightly surreal light. The 14 authors who pen the short stories in Party Like It’s 1984, from Shanghai-based publisher HALiterature, capture this feeling and present it in narratives that highlight both the banality of daily life and the details that can render ordinary lives extraordinary.

Party opens with Josh Stenberg’s “The Devoured Man,” a tale of a young American-born-Chinese journalist that begins as he hops off an overnight train on the trail of a story about an underfunded tiger park. Our muckraker is soon asked to produce his U.S. passport, prompting the park manager to peer quizzically into his face and say, “but you are Chinese.” The story unfolds as a conversation about who and what defines contemporary China, and the ever-changing faces of the people living in it.

Party reveals that divisions like East vs. West undermine the varied and rich cultural backgrounds of the people who occupy China’s urban centers. The stories will strike a chord with readers familiar with life in first-tier cities, from grabbing a cheap lunch at the corner noodle shop, to getting crushed on overcrowded public transportation, to looking on as skyscrapers gradually eat up the skyline. Covering a range of themes from sex to cross-cultural identity crises, the stories speak to the same kind of people who penned them: us.

Party Like It’s 1984, HALiterature, ¥80