pThis is a collection of 12 short stories written by Chinese author Quan Zhang. The first story, titled Colonel Ma's Father, was previously published in the 1996 winter issue of Folio A literary Journal. In the second story titled The balcony, the author used the stream of consciousness and disrupted time sequence that William Faulkner had used so well in his novel, The Sound and the Fury. As in Faulkner's novel, the protagonist is mentally challenged. From his place of imprisonment on the balcony of his family's apartment, in a privileged residential compound, he watches the unfolding of some of the madness of the Cultural Revolution. The author then wrote a half dozen more stories including The Birds Bees in Beijing, The Bridge, Chimeras, Chicken Blood Therapy, The Jaundice Ward and Trojan Rooster, all of which were accepted and published in various literary journals.p