Huge thanks to: Sunyoung Lee, for being a wise and brilliant editor; Neela Banerjee, for all the mountains you move; and everyone at Kaya Press, for your passion and hard work; Rachel Sherman, for your encouragement and guidance on the early drafts of this book; my writing buddies Rachel Khong, for the Ruby and our morning writing sessions at Charlie’s, and Cathy Rose, for our evening writing sessions and France (I couldn’t have finished this book without the both of you!); Chad Lawson, for making me write about what I didn’t want to write about; Corinne Goria, Gravity Goldberg, and Gabrielle Ekedal, for your sister-friendship and for reading early versions of these stories; Peter Orner, Megan Camille Roy, Toni Mirosevich, and Micheline Marcom, for your wisdom and care; Alyson Sinclair; Sunra Thompson; and Maxine Hong Kingston, Gish Jen, and Peter Ho Davies, for letting me see myself in your writing when I most needed it.

Love and gratitude to my family: the Loks, the Lokabrasses, the Ayala-Loks, and especially Julien, my amazing and brilliant husband.

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MIMI LOK is a Chinese writer and editor based in California. Born and raised in the UK, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award and an Ylvisaker Award for Fiction, and her writing has been published or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Lucky Peach, Electric Literature, Nimrod, Hyphen, and elsewhere. She is the cofounder and executive director of Voice of Witness, an award-winning nonprofit that amplifies marginalized voices through an oral history book series and a national education program.