Throughout his time in China, Alex is haunted by the question of belonging: He is not strictly American, by virtue of his expatriate status, but nor is he Chinese. (Locals refer to him as gweilo, or “ghost man,” in Cantonese.) His sense of purpose and identity gradually emerge through his involvement with Ivy, a veteran of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, and her (fictional) Democratic Revolutionary Party, which he allows to organize a workers’ strike at his father’s factory.

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Despite nods to recent Chinese history, Wise’s novel stands on shaky ideological ground. Only through a relationship with a disadvantaged Chinese factory worker does his privileged American protagonist come to affirm what are understood to be Western values of equality and human rights, a plotline that risks reducing China and its problems to mere cultural props in a Western man’s coming-of-age story. With Chinese novels increasingly available in English translations, readers wishing to avoid such Western-centrism might consider provocative alternatives like Lu Nei’s “Young Babylon,” and Sheng Keyi’s “Northern Girls.” (“Factory Girls,” a nonfiction account by Leslie T. Chang, and “Iron Moon,” an anthology of poetry by Chinese workers, also provide illuminating depictions of factory life.)

Nevertheless, both “Number One Chinese Restaurant” and “The Emperor of Shoes” underscore the extent to which the promise of economic opportunity still moves people across great distances on our planet. The Greek root of the word “planet” — planetes — means a wanderer or traveler, and in the sense that we are increasingly global citizens, we are all wanderers. After all, to travel is to experience the volatility of identity and the uncertainty of home. “So we’re the bridge,” Alex says to an American-born friend in Wise’s novel. To which his friend replies: “Right. The middle step. We ain’t Chinese, but we ain’t American. We live here, from there. Inbetweeners.”

In our current climate of exclusionary politics based on privileged citizenships, how much more empathetic it would be to acknowledge the shared “in between” moments of our existence. As Alex reflects at one point, “I pictured myself at peace, in a place where I stood out so goddamn bad that I finally fit in.” In this respect, both Li and Wise have written novels of our times.