AN EXTRA
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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.
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Listen to an excerpt on the Daring to Tell Podcast.
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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.
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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.
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