Lillian Li is the author of Number One Chinese Restaurant (2018), a tale of sibling rivalry and complex family issues that was in turns suspenseful and hilarious. It was, and remains, one of my all-time favorites from 14 years of reviewing, and because of it, I have followed Li on every possible site, waiting to pounce whenever her next novel became available. And perhaps this oversized expectation has fed into my disappointment this time around. Bad Asians is not a dreadful book, but it’s not close to being on par with that first magnificent novel.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Henry Holt for the invitation to read and review. This book will be available to the public February 17, 2026.

Bad Asians tells the story of four young Chinese-Americans who finish college, yet find the American dream they’ve been expecting is still nowhere in sight. Then an old classmate named Grace returns to the neighborhood. Grace had the keys to the kingdom growing up; she had the fanciest house by far, the nicest clothes, and was a source of awe for all of them. Grace seemed to have it made. Now she’s back, and she wants to feature the four of them in her documentary. They agree, albeit without great expectations; the movie will most likely never see the light of day, they figure. Instead, it goes viral on a streaming platform, and it shows all of them as caricatures of their worst selves. They are recognized on the street; they are mocked.

Grace, meanwhile, is in dire financial straits herself; she appeared to have it made, yet that was an illusion.

For some reason, the narrative doesn’t flow as cleanly as Li’s last one, and the frequent changes of setting, both in time and place, are a fair amount of work to follow. I had access to both the digital and audio versions, and whereas the narrator does a decent job, I find myself wondering whether I would have been more successful in keeping track of the story’s many moving parts if I had stuck to the digital version alone. Had I been excited about its potential, I might have backtracked and tried reading it again, but I wasn’t and didn’t—although I did reread small portions of it.

I am probably not within the targeted demographic, since I am not young and not Asian; yet one feature grates on my sensibilities throughout it, and that is the treatment of “Asian-American” and “Chinese-American” as synonyms. It’s true that all of the protagonists are of Chinese origin, but at some point, I would like to have seen recognition that there are other Asian-Americans. Yes, all Chinese-Americans are Asian-Americans, but the reverse is not true, and though I’ve tried to set it aside, I can’t get past the apparent assumption that Americans of Filipino, Japanese, Korean, or Pacific Island heritage—not to even mention many more that hail from other regions of Asia– are irrelevant.

I can’t recommend this novel to you, although I will still happily read Li’s next book. She did it once, and I believe that she can do it again, but this isn’t it.