They say an MFA in creative writing will ruin your enjoyment of a book. Instead of getting caught up in the story, in the characters you love or hate, in the world that’s built to get lost in, you think instead about timing and language, and generally devolve into a joyless obsessive consumed with how to imitate or become an original best. I’ll admit that I think this side of me took over in the first 50 pages of Daniel Tam-Claiborne’s debut novel, Transplants, especially because he is a friend, and I was looking for his voice, himself, in the phrasing and choices. But the deeper I got into the book, the more I forgot him and myself, evermore invested in the two protagonists and how they and their experiences mirror each other.
Transplants is a compelling and surprising novel about Lin, a Chinese college student, who becomes friends with Liz, an American English teacher in China. The two play out a Sliding Doors-adjacent scenario, and the book is braided so that each chapter switches between their two stories. The lines are both generous and tight, the story successfully had me gasping at times, angry, heartbroken. I don’t read a ton of novels, so I don’t read a lot of novels about China and Chinese American experiences, but this book’s existence and this story feel essential.
When we spoke for this interview, Daniel explained that our reading habits are opposite, because all he reads are novels about China and Chinese or Asian American experience. As a result, he set a high bar for himself in writing something he hadn’t read before. “We’re telling stories that have been told in different iterations and across time and geographies,” he says. “But what we’re adding is the nuance of one particular viewpoint that we can bring to bear on a particular set of characters. So I wanted to do my homework: Who’s written about some of these similar issues that take place during a similar time period? I didn’t want to waste people’s time.”
When I asked about his literary elders, he named some classics as well as recent outliers of note: Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Cathy Park Hong, Chang-rae Lee, Salman Rushdie. Of the classics he said, “It’s not that I don’t read their work now, but one of the initial conceits of [my] book was trying not to cater to an explicitly Western audience. Not to say that those authors were, but it was a different time, right? You know Amy Tan, I have a lot of respect for her and her work, but not a lot of people had understanding or contact with Asian Americans, with Chinese Americans specifically, at that time, and they saw Asian Americans as inscrutable, hard to read, through this perpetual foreigner stereotype. Unfortunately, a lot of that is still true, two generations later. I think the last thing a writer wanted to do at that time was write something illegible to the audience with whom they were trying to find connection. So Tan’s work does an incredible job of teaching the reader customs and traditions about Chinese history, lineage, ancestry in a way that those characters, if left to their own devices, would not be saying [so much] because they implicitly know about their own families, their own histories.”
Of his influences, he mentioned Aube Rey Lescure’s River East, River West; The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang; and The Leavers by Lisa Ko. Of The Leavers, he said he closely imitated the structure, tone, tenor, and narrative shifts in Transplants. “My own obsession as a writer is around that dynamic, valence of feeling, not fully belonging in America, but also having a similar but different experience when you go to like, ‘the homeland.’”
As we spoke about Liz and Lin—the former a Chinese American teaching English in China; the latter Chinese and an exceptionally good student of English, and many other subjects—Daniel confessed the characters were two parts of himself, and they served in the book as mirrors to each other. As one came, the other went. They crossed paths only once and had a beautiful kind of falling-in-love friendship, that for a moment, I swear I thought was gonna go beautifully queer, but did not, alas. Instead, they lived parallel lives, finding shreds of evidence from their respective familial pasts, and struggling to reconcile all of that with their own futures. “I see them as surrogates,” Daniel says. “Which is why I made the names so similar. I was thinking about how, from the outside, they can be read as interchangeable, in a way that we sort of think about the mutability of the Asian diaspora, this very stereotypical view that individuals could stand in for others.
“There is something to be said about the ways in which the world has seen so many unfairly, or not fully, as a result.” Daniel continues, “There’s instances of that in the way that Liz characterizes Lin, and in terms of the naiveness that she attributes to Lin. There was a huge part of me that wanted to address that if these two have this enormous gulf, then what does that say about the greater population? If I’m able to figure out, what are the ways in which they’re misunderstanding and mischaracterizing each other, and also the ways in which they’re able to find greater understanding through this shared connection, then hopefully, that may give hope to the ways in which we all might broaden our viewpoints and ability to empathize with and tolerate others.”
An exciting and warm element in Daniel’s book is that there is Mandarin throughout the dialogue, inner and outer, for his characters. This move didn’t take me out of the story as someone who knows exactly no Mandarin. Instead, it brought me in. In not knowing exactly what was written, I read the scene and context for meaning, feeling a discomfort both these main characters in their own ways experienced with Mandarin (in Liz’s case) or English (in Lin’s case), depending on the situation. “It’s not the utmost priority to me whether or not anyone who reads this is able to absorb 100 percent of everything that’s happening,” said Daniel. “I think that’s exciting. It’s more our generation, who are trying to play with how that can look and to give permission to do that, so others can tell stories without the hangups of writing to a particular audience.”
In our friendship, I’m perpetually surprised at Daniel’s ability to stay cool, to empathize, to offer solutions. He himself will never admit that he possesses those qualities, but he did offer that he has many female friendships, and that that was a way into writing two complex female characters. “In my own life, my closest friends are women. So in some ways it didn’t feel wholly out of character to try to inhabit that world,” Daniel says. “Of course, I was greatly helped by first readers who could call me out on lots of things that were problematic and saved the book from going into really inauthentic territory. There was a desire to talk about issues that decenter men, that talk about patriarchy and inequality in these sorts of relationships. Thinking really deeply and hard about what it means to live a life that’s outside of yourself, I think, forced me to do more due diligence and more research than maybe I would have if it was just me trying to write about any random man that exists in that same space.”
The CID is a primary setting in the book, and despite all my time spent there, his storytelling in that space had me there in a whole new way. We spoke about how he managed to write about lesser-known parts of the neighborhood during COVID, and whether he was there and doing the things he was writing about. I also wondered what kind of interviewing and research he’d done to get a close-up of a part of Seattle that, it could be argued, felt the effects of COVID the hardest. Particularly because the CID in the book, at the height of COVID, is not the CID most of us know before nor after lockdown.
“I was volunteering with a group called SCIDpda, the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority,” says Daniel. “Every week, they had volunteers deliver groceries to elders in buildings. I was lucky to have the benefit of meeting someone who, like one of my characters, is from China and studied nursing in the US. I asked him why he was interested in studying nursing—like why are you trying to help people who, in some cases, may harbor these incredibly negative stereotypes about you? Why would you want to stay in America? It was really helpful to gain perspectives of people who were in those positions themselves, and be able to glean aspects of their rationale that could be applied to the characters.”
About halfway through Transplants, I wondered how Daniel was going to reconcile all this critique of the United States, for the simple reason that he lives here. The book lays bare the ways in which this country’s government essentially left us all to die, while many other countries around the world took extreme measures to care for themselves and each other. I wondered: How do we care for each other? Specifically in the United States, because that’s where a lot of the book takes place, and because it seems our only option: Our government is doing its very best to harm us.
“I think some part of it comes down to recognizing each other’s humanity, forming broader coalitions,” says Daniel. “I don’t think the panacea is that Pan Asian solidarity will save the world, as much as I would love that to be true. There’s still tons of infighting, even if you talk about the broader umbrella of Asian American communities, and we still make up a very, very small percentage of the US by population. So it’s not as if anything we do in concert could necessarily counteract these external forces that make life challenging.”
“In trying to imagine the lives of Lin and Liz beyond this moment,” Daniel continues, “it’s hard to see an argument where Liz continues to live in China just because of the ways in which things have continued to escalate, creating an environment that’s more hostile to outsiders, and also, provides fewer opportunities for folks both international and domestic. And the same could be said of America. This is an incredibly inhospitable place to live for Americans, let alone for any immigrant or non-residency-holding individual. So why would anyone want to make their life more difficult? It takes an incredible leap of faith. Maybe the true extraordinariness of these characters is that they are willing to go to these incredible lengths to find a sense of belonging, even when that road is paved with potholes and landmines, and just the most awful things possible. They’re still willing to give it their best shot.”
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Transplants is available via Regalo Press. Daniel Tam-Claiborne will be at Third Place Books in Ravenna on June 17 for a conversation with Anne Liu Kellor.
