The Train to Lo Wu is a collection of short stories by Jess Row published in January 2005. The book contains seven loosely related stories set in or related to Hong Kong. They all deal with the tension felt between insiders and outsiders, especially between locals and foreigners visiting for study or work. The stories "The Secret of Bats" Alice, a young English student, experiments with echolocation as a means to dealing with her mother's suicide, which attracts her confused and alienated American English teacher. She shares with her teacher a fragmented and strangely eloquent journal about her attempts at echolocation, which becomes a consuming personal project. The story ends on her apartment's rooftop, as Alice and the teacher embrace. Characters: Alice Leung: sixteen-year-old Chinese student who looks 12; tall girl, narrow face, pinched around the mouth, her cheeks pitted with acne scars. She pretends she is a bat, wandering around in a blindfold, trying to gain a bat's sense of orientation. She wants to show her teacher how it works to prove it to him. Unpopular; other girls ignore her and she keeps to herself. She experiments with echolocation as a means to dealing with her mother’s suicide. Alice’s mom: committed suicide. The reason Alice wants to act like a bat—so she can communicate with her mom Narrator: American teacher in Hong Kong. Becomes engulfed in the Chinese lifestyle (on the bus when an old woman gives him money for the New Year he says he has forgotten what America was like). He is a good, genuine person who wants the best for his students (stays after school for Alice’s experiments). Caring and optimistic (goes to visit Alice at her house when she invites him) "The American Girl" A young woman, a student from Oklahoma, visits a blind masseur regularly in order to pry from him information about his boyhood during the Cultural Revolution. Through the course of the story, what one first assumes is a friendship between the young woman and old man, is in fact a case of cultural misunderstanding, the American believing that telling his traumatic story would be healthy for the old man, and the Chinese man trying to avoid what he perceives as her invasive interrogation. "The Train to Lo Wu" A Hong Kong resident and businessman, Harvey, is drawn to a girl named Lin who lives in Shenzhen but comes from the rural