Los Angeles, Please Forget Me

Los Angeles, Please Forget Me

This is a gritty, realistic, long-form novel about immigrant survival, rooted in the lives of working-class Chinese people in Los Angeles. Told in the first person by a Chinese food-delivery rider, it focuses on the riders working for the fictional delivery platform Little Bear Eats, portraying the struggles and downward spiral of drifters on the streets of Los Angeles. The protagonist has been stranded overseas for three years, making a living as an undocumented worker. He works in a kitchen during the day and races around delivering food late at night. He shares a home with a girl from another country, and they keep each other warm through endless hardship. Yet deep down, he remains haunted by his debts to his wife and child back in China, trapped between family ties, guilt, and reality.

Beneath the everyday bustle, undercurrents run deep. Scheming and exploitation within the Chinese community, gray-market ways of making a living, racial discrimination, and random street violence intertwine to form a stark portrait of life at the bottom. The fragile peace of their days is shattered by a sudden, malicious murder on Sixth Street. His honest, hardworking housemate, who had been saving every penny to return to China, is killed for no reason in a random attack by a homeless drug addict.

An unexpected death tears away the illusion of safety. The fickleness of human relationships, the platform's indifference, the impotence of the justice system, and the separation of loved ones follow one after another. These ordinary people who crossed oceans to make a living have no glittering American Dream, only endless nights, dangers they cannot escape, and a future they cannot grasp. In plain, realistic prose, the novel lays bare love, family, human nature, and regret among the working poor, revealing the most humble yet unforgettable fate of those adrift in a foreign land: they cross mountains and seas in search of survival, only to become passersby this city will never remember.