May-lee Chai
May-lee Chai is the author of two recent short story collections, Tomorrow in Shanghai, which debuted of August 2022, and the American Book Award-winning collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants, eight additional books of fiction and nonfiction, and the translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin. She is the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship in Prose, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and an Honorable Mention from the Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Outstanding Book Awards.
Reading List
Editor’s Note: Crossing All Kinds of Borders
I am thrilled to have this opportunity to serve as the BIPOC Editorial Fellow for this issue of Shenandoah. I applied to the fellowship shortly after the shocking early death of Cambodian American writer Anthony Veasna So. I had been reading So’s powerful short stories online and interacting with So on Twitter. I was looking […]
Hong’s Mother
Hong was nineteen and had been studying in France for three months when her mother called out of the blue. “Guess what? I won the raffle at the St. Patrick’s Day Gala!” Hong’s mother’s voice, triumphant, crackled over the phone line. “Tickets for two to Vegas.” “That’s great,” Hong said, wondering why her mother called […]