AN EXTRA
AN EXTRA, first runner-up for the 2024 Red Hen Press Women's Prose Prize Award, is a memoir of displacement and belonging, of finding a voice and losing it, of what it means to arrive in America too old to assimilate, yet too young to disappear.
Listen to an excerpt on the Daring to Tell Podcast.
AN EXTRA is currently querying agents.
InBetweenNess
There's always an impulse to explain.
I spoke Chinese exclusively until the age 32. So it begins.
I wrote a line in English, unsatisfied, then switched it to Chinese, equally unsatisfied. Whatever I put down, none of it was right… What-to-write has little to do with the content; it has everything to do with the very decision of language itself. Almost like not being able to decide between the two pens to hold, except this specific tool - language - ties to my heartstring. It ties to the reference in life that shapes my very perceived reality.
By choosing what language to write, I choose to enter an associated framework, sometimes, an ideology. I went about my life in a massive in-betweenness, in between two languages – their utterances, rules and expectations - and in between worlds.
How Do I Explain Myself - New England Review Issue 44.2
Discounted link to purchase a copy or read an excerpt here.
Stay in the loop!
Get quick updates from me when new work is published.