Contemporary Authors

• Deceit and Other Possibilities: Stories Aquarius Press (Detroit, MI), 2016
• A River of Stars ( novel) Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 2018

1. A river of stars : a novel LCCN 2018009300 Type of material Book Personal name Hua, Vanessa, author. Main title A river of stars : a novel / Vanessa Hua. Published/Produced New York : Ballantine Books, 2018. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9780399178788 (hardback) CALL NUMBER PS3608.U2245 R58 2018 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Deceit and other possibilities : stories LCCN 2016948373 Type of material Book Personal name Hua, Vanessa. Main title Deceit and other possibilities : stories / Vanessa Hua. Published/Produced Detroit, MI : Aquarius Press, 2016. Projected pub date 1609 Description pages cm ISBN 9780997199628 (perfect binding)

• Amazon -

  Vanessa Hua, a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, is author of DECEIT AND OTHER POSSIBILITIES and the forthcoming A RIVER OF STARS. She received an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, and the San Francisco Foundation's James D. Phelan Award for fiction. She has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, Aspen Summer Words, Voices of Our Nation, Community of Writers at Squaw, and Napa Valley writing conferences. Her work has appeared in New York Times, FRONTLINE/World, PRI's The World, The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, Guernica, and elsewhere. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and twins.

• Wikipedia -

  Vanessa Hua
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  Vanessa Hua
  Citizenship
  American
  Alma mater
  Stanford University, UC Riverside
  Notable works
  Deceit and Other Possibilities
  Notable awards
  Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, James D. Phelan literary award, Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, Asian American Journalists Association’s National Journalism Award, James Madison Freedom of Information Award
  Vanessa Hua is a journalist and writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of Deceit and Other Possibilities (Willow Books, 2016) and A River of Stars and The Sea Places, which are forthcoming from Ballantine Books. She is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle [1] and a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.[2] Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, Guernica, and other publications.

  Contents
  1
  Awards and Critical acclaim
  2
  Bibliography
  3
  References
  4
  External links
  Awards and Critical acclaim[edit]
  2017 Dr. Suzanne Ahn Award for Civil Rights and Social Justice Reporting [3]
  2017 Finalist, California Book Award [4]
  2016-17 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature [5]
  2015 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award [6]
  Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing [7]
  San Francisco Foundation's James D. Phelan Award for fiction [8]
  Bibliography[edit]
  Deceit and Other Possibilities (Willow Publishing 2016) ISBN 978-0997199628
  A River of Stars (Ballantine Books August 2018) ISBN 978-0399178788, a novel about San Francisco Chinatown[9]

• Publishers Weekly - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/interviews/article/76769-a-brothel-in-reverse-pw-talks-with-vanessa-hua.html

  A Brothel in Reverse: PW Talks with Vanessa Hua
  By Seth Satterlee | May 04, 2018

  Comments

  Hua’s debut novel, A River of Stars (Ballantine, Aug.), follows a tenacious Chinese factory clerk named Scarlett Chen who escapes an illegal maternity home in L.A. and flees to San Francisco’s Chinatown.
  How did your work as a journalist inform this book?

  Photo by Andria Lo
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  I’ve long been writing about Asia and the Asian-American community—getting to know American Chinatowns and also going into the countryside in China, visiting factories, getting an understanding of what drives people to leave the countryside and the impact that has on villages where everyone of working age leaves for cities. That was the backdrop of all of my reporting.
  What gave you the idea for a story about maternity centers used to claim U.S. citizenship?
  When I was pregnant with my twins in Southern California, I began hearing about these maternity centers. Neighbors would complain about pregnant women coming and going. It sounded like a brothel in reverse. I began to find out about the phenomena of wealthy Chinese coming here to give birth in these centers. I became interested in what could drive someone to give birth so far away from your family. It’s the most vulnerable time of your life. I was also fascinated by the notion of having all these pregnant women together in one place. When you’re in a house of pregnant women, who gets to be queen? Although the book’s plot sprang from my imagination, I’ve since learned that there is often conflict between the expecting mothers within the centers. No one gets to be special.
  Is Mama Fang, who runs a maternity center, based on a real person?
  No. But there is an archetype in Chinese literature of the smooth talking dealer who brokers deals. To me, she is the modern version of the striving wheeler-dealer that could make a center like this work.
  These centers often skirt the law, so how are they still able to operate?
  Even though the Feds issued search warrants and tried to shut many centers down, there are still websites that advertise the services. Just yesterday I saw an ad of a pregnant belly Photoshopped with an American flag and the words “why would you DIY your American birth?” I’ve seen reports that Russian mothers are now getting in on it. There have been reports about South Korean and Turkish mothers. For all that’s happening in this country, American citizenship is still highly prized.
  Parts of the book are simultaneously distressing and funny. How do you incorporate humor into a narrative like this?
  One pregnant woman running is a tragedy, but two pregnant women running becomes comedy. So much of being pregnant is being humiliated—your body isn’t the same, you’re swollen, you’re giant. You survive it by being able to laugh at yourself.
  A version of this article appeared in the 05/07/2018 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: A Brothel in Reverse

• San Francisco Chronicle - https://www.sfchronicle.com/author/vanessa-hua/

  Vanessa Hua is a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the Hartford Courant and the Los Angeles Times. At The Chronicle, she launched an investigation that led to the resignation of the California secretary of state and prompted investigations by the FBI.
  She’s won a number of journalism awards from groups including the Asian American Journalist Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. She also won the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.
  Her short-story collection, “Deceit and Other Possibilities,” will be published by Willow Books in the fall, and she recently signed a contract with Ballantine Books to publish two novels: “A River of Stars,” which won a Rona Jaffe Award, and “The Sea Places.”

• Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/08/25/641622076/a-river-of-stars-is-an-asian-american-pregnant-thelma-louise

  Author Interviews
  < 'A River Of Stars' Is An Asian-American, 'Pregnant Thelma & Louise' August 25, 20188:22 AM ET Listen· 6:50 6:50 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email SCOTT SIMON, HOST: "A River Of Stars" is a kind of road story. Scarlett and Daisy, a factory worker from China and a Taiwanese-American teenager, go on the lam from the Perfume Bay, a secret home in Los Angeles where women from China are sent - by rich husbands, married lovers or prosperous parents - to give birth to their babies in the United States - to give them the most precious gift of all they say, American citizenship. But Scarlett and Daisy have their own suspicions about what might happen to them after they give birth. "A River of Stars" is a novel, the first from Vanessa Hua, who is also a columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. She joins us from KQED in San Francisco. Thanks so much for being with us. VANESSA HUA: It's an honor. Thanks for having me today. SIMON: The father of Scarlett's baby is Boss Yeung. He owns a factory in China where she works. He is married. He has three daughters. Family lives in Hong Kong. Scarlett is from the countryside, where China's one-child policy has been in effect. What kind of life has she had? HUA: Well, she's an only child, as many women or children from her generation are. And she has, you know, grown up in the countryside, dreaming of a life outside of the one that's been handed down to her. Her mother, by necessity, works in a family planning clinic. Scarlett, as a child, has witnessed, you know, the very draconian ways the government enforced the policy. And so when she's a teenager, she decides to leave to go work in the factories. And the policy has made her ambivalent about having children. So when she comes to be pregnant and comes to America, it's, you know, a journey into motherhood and making a life in a new country. SIMON: Against expectation - at least my expectation - Boss Yeung is delighted to find out that his lover Scarlett is pregnant, isn't he? HUA: Yes, because he has three daughters, and the sonogram seems to indicate that he's, you know, having a son. And because of the traditional preference for boys in China, you know, this seems like just what he's been waiting for. SIMON: Why does he send her to a place like Perfume Bay? HUA: Because, for him, he sees U.S. citizenship as the gold standard - that having the passport means freedom to travel. It means potential opportunities in the future. It symbolizes everything that he wants for his child even if he, you know, chooses not to exercise that at this moment. SIMON: For reasons we won't go into, Scarlett decides to make a break for it. Daisy, the teenager, is a stowaway in the van she drives. What do they find in each other's company? HUA: Yeah, I've been calling it a pregnant "Thelma & Louise." SIMON: I almost put that in our lead. HUA: (Laughter). SIMON: But I've got to tell you. I thought that would be a tasteless thing for a man to say, so I didn't. HUA: (Laughter) Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, I think Daisy is a teenager. Scarlett is twice her age. You know, Scarlett is from the countryside. Daisy is from the city and from privilege. But they find a kinship in each other. I think there's an independence and a feistiness. And although, at first, they're sort of unlikely comrades, over time they form a makeshift family - especially as they settle into San Francisco's Chinatown. SIMON: And that's one of the pleasures of this book - is Scarlett discovering the U.S. You know, the first meal is McDonald's fries, as I recall. (Laughter) You write (reading) Scarlett discovers nothing signified your wealth and refinement more than dining on toy-sized food. She and Daisy discover a way to take advantage of that, don't they? HUA: Yes, like many immigrants, they are seeking a way to make a living. And they become entrepreneurs of sorts. And after a series of events, Scarlett creates something called the hand babao, which, you know, is her take on sliders but with a Chinese touch - roast pork, plum sauce, scallions. Yeah, they're delicious. SIMON: I gather you were beginning your own family when you began to write this novel. HUA: Yes, I was pregnant and living in Southern California. And when I first heard about these maternity hotels of the sort that Scarlett and Daisy end up in, you know, the news stories were really interesting. The neighbors were baffled. Why were all these pregnant Chinese women coming and going? Why were their diapers piled up in the garbage cans? It sounded like a brothel in reverse. And what really struck me was being pregnant is one of those vulnerable times in a woman's life. And what was it like to be so far from friends and family? The other thing about being pregnant and sort of the things that - how it influenced the novel was that when you're pregnant like I was with twins, you're hugely pregnant. I think when I went to the gym and went for a swim, people thought they were about to witness a water birth. (LAUGHTER) HUA: So - but given that, people would always say, oh, come to the head of the line. You know, take this seat - and were very gentle and generous with me. But in the maternity hotel, you have a dozen pregnant women. SIMON: Yeah. HUA: So who gets the good wishes? Who gets to be queen bee? So it seemed like a situation ripe for drama but also comedy. SIMON: I don't want to give away plot developments about which Scarlett and Daisy helps save each other. But I do just want to stipulate that it's unexpected, clever, contemporary and truly Californian. HUA: Thank you. (LAUGHTER) SIMON: You don't even want to hint at it, right? (LAUGHTER) HUA: People have said that it's surprising but yet inevitable - in the way that all endings you could ever hope would be. I'd been stuck for a while thinking about how I'd kind of address it. And I think I was like swimming a lap, and I thought, aha, this is what's going to happen. You know, the answer has been there all along. SIMON: Yeah. So many characters in your story say, in so many words, oh, that wouldn't happen in the United States. Or they'll take care of you here in the U.S. But I guess we have to ask in the summer of 2018 with separated families at the border - so much nasty invective toward immigrants. Do you believe that's still true? HUA: I think there definitely are ways in which people can make their way in this country. Of course, you know, with the rhetoric out there, communities are frightened. You know, are we perceived as eternal foreigners, no matter how deep our roots are or how many contributions we make to this country in so many different ways? Whether it's in the activism we've been seeing, or even in the ways that we're asserting ourselves in entertainment and pop culture, we're not leaving. We're from here. We're here to stay. SIMON: Vanessa Hua, her new novel, "A River of Stars." Thanks so much for being with us. HUA: Thank you. (SOUNDBITE OF BROKE FOR FREE SONG, "BLOOM DAY")

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/motherhood-and-migration-an-interview-with-vanessa-hua-on-a-river-of-stars/#!

  Motherhood and Migration: An Interview with Vanessa Hua on “A River of Stars”
  Melody Schreiber interviews Vanessa Hua

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  SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

  SCARLETT CHEN LEARNED long ago how to survive on her own. She was only a teenager when she left her rural village for the huge factory cities in China; over the years, she relied on her wits and determination to climb up the factory leadership. But now she’s facing her greatest challenge — and she’s not alone anymore. When Scarlett’s plane touches down in Los Angeles, she embarks on a perilous journey into motherhood — here, in an entirely new country, far from everyone and everything she has ever known.
  A River of Stars, Vanessa Hua’s first novel, is a stirring exploration of identity: what it means to be a parent, a lover, a friend. Both physically and emotionally, Scarlett lives between two worlds, caught between China and the United States, between tradition and modernity, between vulnerability and evolution. What does she discard and what does she keep as she searches for a place to belong?
  I spoke to Hua about the duality of motherhood and migration, and the meaning of legacy — what we leave behind and what carries on long after we’re gone.
  ¤
  MELODY SCHREIBER: Thank you for writing this book. While I was reading it, my son started daycare, and I’ve grappled with wanting to be with him but also needing and wanting to work. In one part of the story, your main character, Scarlett, starts working after having a child. She feels so useful, so like her old self, when she’s working, but she also worries constantly that she’s failing her daughter. It really resonated with me, how much of motherhood is a balance — not just balancing your time, which is a huge undertaking in itself, but also balancing yourself, your identity. How will a baby change me and the way I live my life? How do I hold on to my essential self, and how much will I change?
  VANESSA HUA: I always knew I wanted kids, but I also always wondered what’s going to happen? Who will I be?
  The circumstances in which my main character, Scarlett, finds herself couldn’t be more different from mine. But at the same time, any woman who becomes a mother is faced with very similar decisions. On a practical level, you are responsible for keeping another human alive every day. But on another level, you’re going through so many changes. So much shape-shifting happens, starting with your own body. You’re growing someone else inside you. And you’ll then be in charge of taking care of them once they’re born.
  It’s interesting how blind you can be to what is around you, until it becomes relevant to you. Having kids made me see the world in different ways. From practical aspects, like where the nearest playground is, to the more profound, like how language is formed and developed.
  Once we visited REI and my kids saw kayaks standing upright. They were calling them rocket ships. I said, “They are! They look exactly like rocket ships!”
  Kids are natural poets. They have this freedom and facility with language that we as creative writers are trying to find our way back to. And just trying to explain things like racism and inequality, or Thanksgiving, or Martin Luther King Jr. — you begin to think about what and how you were taught, how you were raised.
  When I thought about having kids, I often focused on everything I wouldn’t be able to do — stay out late or travel as easily or make decisions as spontaneously. I never really thought about the ways in which my life would become richer and the world might open up to me, from starting or deepening relationships to seeing the world differently.
  Yes! Because I didn’t know what being a parent was like, I thought about all the things that would be closed off to me. When, in fact, there are all sorts of ways you engage with the world as a parent, and it helps you understand a greater range of the human experience.
  I started writing this novel in the months after giving birth, and a lot of that is reflected in Scarlett. Nothing that’s one-to-one, nothing that happened in my life happening in hers. But I was thinking about the transformations mothers go through, our identities, the work we do and how that work is valued. And the relationships we form, the families we make that are not passed down by genetics but formed by us.
  When she was a teen, Scarlett migrated within China from her rural village to a factory city, and she had to learn how to survive on her own. Now, she’s making her way in an entirely new country. She has left behind the only life she’s ever known; add to that the transition of becoming a mother. Now it’s all about finding her footing. Scarlett is coming to terms with the kind of life she will build for herself and her child.
  Scarlett has, by necessity, led a very solitary life. She has never quite found friendship or community or lasting love; but in having a child, she opens herself up to possibilities that she didn’t before. That’s something that often happens in motherhood. She comes to a point where she realizes she can’t always just leave and start a new life. She wants to form deep roots and longer-lasting relationships.
  Your book grapples with these deep emotional and psychological themes, but it is also very much concerned with the physical — from Scarlett’s pregnancy and postpartum time, to other characters’ very serious illnesses. It speaks to how our bodies bind us to this earth for a certain time, but our bloodlines continue after we’re gone.
  As I was writing the book, it was the start of my twins’ life, but my father was ailing; he had Parkinson’s. He was able to meet the twins, but he passed away when they were only 10 months old. I was aware, as I’d never been before, of mortality. That’s reflected in the book. I explore questions of legacy, the afterlife, and mortality. A big question in the book is, What is my legacy? What will my life have meant?
  I really enjoyed the characters in your story. Scarlett finds it difficult to connect with people, especially women, but she’s super savvy and very shrewd. Boss Yeung and Mama Fang are similar, then you get to know them and see where their vulnerabilities and softnesses lay. Even your minor characters have unusual depth. They might be secondary or tertiary characters, but they have a story.
  Characters, even though they’re minor, shouldn’t be a device. No person should be a device to move the plot along. That’s when you run into problems with stereotypes. I strive, in my journalism and my fiction, to make characters as complex and complicated as they are in real life. Particularly with Mama Fang and Boss Yeung, from the outset they come off as villainous or at the very least questionable. But then, like anything, it comes down to understanding their history, their circumstances, and their motivations. You still might not agree with what they’ve done, but at least they’re not defined by one action.
  With Scarlett, her journey is not just about survival, but also expansion. You can only be isolated for so long; this is her way of coming into her own as a person, by finding a community. She forms the family she’s never had before.
  Why was telling this story important to you? What do you want readers to get from the story, if nothing else?
  I really appreciate the way books have helped expand my understanding of the world. Fiction fosters empathy among readers by putting them in a position to consider deeply someone’s history, hopes, and ambitions. I hope people reading this book would either be exposed to something new to them, or — also importantly — would feel recognized, like they’re seeing something familiar to them. When I was growing up, I often didn’t have access to or didn’t know about books that had characters who were Chinese-American or Chinese. I hope that readers either feel seen or feel like their eyes are opened in some way.
  Scarlett is a migrant mother facing the very real possibility of being deported and being separated from her daughter. It is, unfortunately, a very timely issue. But this is also something that has been going on for a long time.
  There’s a narrative that immigrants only come by foot over our southern border. It’s false. Two-thirds of people who are undocumented in the United States actually came in legally and then continued living here on visa overstays. The immigration system is broken, but it’s much more complex — and the solutions are far more complex — than simply, for instance, building a wall.
  America prides itself on being a nation of immigrants. It’s our origin myth. But even though it’s our history, there’s been controversy for as long as there’s been immigration — certainly around Chinese immigrants, with the Chinese Exclusion Act that began in 1882 and didn’t end until well into the 20th century, in 1943. Throughout modern Chinese history, families have been separated; both within China, as parents work in factories and send their children to villages to be raised by grandparents, and also through migration to and from the United States. There is an enormous pain and trauma around that separation.
  In my story, both Scarlett and Daisy are in incredibly vulnerable situations. Their children could be taken away from them. It also brings up issues around reproductive choice, which can be defined not only by the decision to have a child or not, but what will happen to that child if you do have one. How will you raise them in a vulnerable situation like this? How will you keep yourself and your child together?
  Hopefully the novel broadens people’s understanding of immigration to this country: how people get in, how they live, what they’re striving for.
  How has your own background informed this story, and to what degree?
  I’ve been covering Asia and the diaspora for two decades. I’ve reported from the Pearl River Delta, from which many Chinatown residents migrate. In the villages, the very old care for the very young; anyone of working age lives in the cities. I’ve seen what the changes in China’s economy have done to families. And it touches across the Pacific. I try to depict many of these close connections, the back-and-forth of migrants to ancestral and adopted homelands, in the book.
  I remember when my short story collection came out, people asked, “What character is most like you?” They all are. All of these characters came from my imagination.
  I’ve likened it to dust forming up in the clouds, and finally it gets heavy enough for a raindrop to fall down. All the reporting I’ve done or conversations I’ve had or articles and books I’ve read — they’re seeding the cloud until finally it gets heavy enough to start raining. To start writing.
  ¤
  Melody Schreiber is a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. Follow her on Twitter: @m_scribe.

• The Rumpus - https://therumpus.net/2018/07/the-rumpus-interview-with-vanessa-hua-2/

  That Balancing Act: A Conversation with Vanessa Hua
  By Simmi Aujla
  July 16th, 2018
  Vanessa Hua’s forthcoming novel, A River of Stars (out August 14 from Ballantine Books) is a story of immigration, survival, and love in its many forms: romantic love between a woman and the father of her child, sisterly love between two women navigating the challenges of first-time motherhood, and the ineffable bond between mother and daughter.
  Hua, the author of the short story collection Deceit and Other Possibilities, is an award-winning journalist, having reported about Asia and the diaspora for nearly two decades. Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan award, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing.
  Recently, I sat down with Hua to discuss writing across continents, how fiction picks up where the official record leaves off, and why her parents save printouts of her emails.
  ***
  The Rumpus: A River of Stars depicts the many struggles of your protagonist, Scarlett, a first-generation Chinese-American woman who left behind a job in a factory in China for a new life in America with her unborn child. You’re second-generation Chinese-American. What was it like writing a first-generation narrative?
  Vanessa Hua: I have been long fascinated by what it takes for someone to move to another country bereft of language, culture, and family. I had a chance to report from China, seeing workers migrate from the countryside to factories in major cities. Life was so completely different than their parents could have imagined. It seemed so powerful to me, that continual urge to seek a life different from the one handed down to you. Scarlett is my character. She’s fictional. But I hope I was able to honor the experiences of people like her that I’ve met and reported on over the years.
  Rumpus: I loved the passage where Boss Yeung—the protagonist’s lover—goes back to Scarlett’s rural hometown in China. He manages to track down Scarlett’s mother, a local official who’s been weighed down by the responsibility of enforcing the one-child policy in her region. Boss Yeung discovers that this no-nonsense woman has saved a notebook that has sentimental value; it was important to Scarlett as a child. What ideas or experiences did you draw on?
  Hua: Part of Scarlett becoming a mother was coming to terms with her own childhood, too. How do you come to understand who your parents are and why they do what they do?
  The other day my mother was cleaning her desk. She was so delighted when she found a printout of an email I had written her in college. It was just an email forward. She was getting something checked out, so I had sent her some background info. It wasn’t even this heartfelt note, but it mattered to her that it came from me.
  Similarly, a couple years ago, I found a folder of emails my dad had printed out from me, my sister, and my brother. People used to print out emails, can you imagine? People used to read emails. It was very touching. We were dashing something off in between classes, and they were printing it out and saving it in a folder.
  Of course, they came to this country with a suitcase. They didn’t have stacks of mementos going back twenty years. Scarlett’s mother is not a woman with many possessions. So it was one of the few things that she saved that mattered to her.
  Rumpus: At one point in the novel, Scarlett realizes she can use her reservoir of stories of difficult events she’s witnessed in China to prove that she deserves asylum. I’m always pondering how we share the dark side of our cultures without falling into tropes, into caricatures of misery. What does this moment mean for Scarlett? And how does it tie into the way Asian or Asian-American writers might feel pressured to depict experiences from the motherland in a certain way?
  Hua: I think for her, it’s some recognition, that something that you have actually does have value. As it pertains to writing, you might think, “This doesn’t fit the canon. This doesn’t fit what people expect from China.” But the story still matters. And maybe matters even more because no one’s ever heard it. But you’re right. There’s a line, where the lawyer says to Scarlett, referring to hardships experienced at the hands of the Chinese government: “If it didn’t happen, it doesn’t matter. That’s what they want to hear about China.” There’s always that balancing act. What can you offer that’s true to the character but not pandering?

  Rumpus: What’s your sense of your audience?
  Hua: Writing for my hometown newspaper, both reporting about Asian-American issues and now as a columnist, I have a very palpable sense from the letters and emails I get. But I’m always so surprised and moved by who I might hear from as an author. I’ll hear from people who say: “This is my experience totally. I feel the shock of recognition.” And then there are people who say “I’m not Asian, I’m not a woman, I’m none of these things, but I am deeply moved by this and can relate to this on a human level.”
  I remember getting a really lovely note from a reader who said, “I’m engaged to someone Korean and my brother is engaged to someone Italian. Immigration is part of our family story. Thank you for writing a book that helps illuminate my understanding about it.” I still haven’t gotten over the fact that people I don’t know are reading my fiction. Because at least with journalism, you know, it’s about the news. People need to read it or are supposed to read it. But fiction is totally optional.
  Rumpus: And an investment of time.
  Hua: Exactly. My sense of a reader is someone who can be moved by it. You just never know. At the time that I’m writing, I’m totally consumed by the characters and the world of the novel. Then it’s done and starts making its way out in the real world, and in some ways it’s a mystery of who it will really touch or how people will react. And you have no control over it.
  Rumpus: You were pregnant when you began writing this novel. How did your relationship with the work change over the course of your pregnancy and the birth of your sons?
  Hua: When I was pregnant, that’s when I heard about these maternity centers [where Scarlett lives at the start of the novel]. I was living in Southern California at the time. I came across an article where a neighbor said one of the women even escaped and knocked on the door and begged him to take her to McDonald’s. It got me thinking. Pregnancy is the most vulnerable time in your life. A time when you want to be at home or around family if you have a good relationship with them. Or a time when people often say, “Oh why don’t you come to the head of the line?” or “Let me give you my seat.” But what if you’re in a houseful of pregnant women? I was wondering what the dynamic behind that would be like, this sorority of pregnant women. So I wrote something, and that was a short story, actually. And at the time, I didn’t know it was going to be a novel. I was working on other things, then I had my twins. But I felt drawn to finding out what would happen next.
  Rumpus: And your relationship with the work?
  Hua: As for my relationship to writing overall, you go from having your time being entirely your own to feeling like you’re learning how to walk again. Completing a sentence—let alone a paragraph—can feel hard to pull off. Let alone stringing together those paragraphs to make a chapter! But eventually, I was able to complete a draft.
  I’ve had friends who aren’t going to have kids say things like, “Oh I wish I could follow a kid around so I could take down what they’re saying.” And I’m like, “Welcome to my life!” I have less time than I had before. But I have so many things I want to say because they’ve kind of reopened my eyes to the wonder of the world.
  There’s a moment in the novel when the kids see rain for the first time. It was inspired by something that happened with the twins. They had just started to learn how to walk and were out on the lawn. They were just staring up at the sky. And I thought: “This is amazing! Water is falling from the sky.”
  Or even the way they are with language. When you think about why you speak the way you do. They think kayaks look like missiles, so they call them “rocket ships.” They call Hershey’s Kisses “castle chocolates” because of the little flag on the top. As we grow up, we kind of get caught up with the correct way of composing a sentence. But as a creative writer, I’m trying to find my way back to the freeness we have with language as children.
  Rumpus: You describe reading in the news about the maternity centers specifically for Chinese-American women so they can give birth to children in America, thereby giving their kids the advantage of American citizenship. As a former journalist, I’m fascinated by how journalism—both your own deeply reported stories and the pieces others have written that you’ve stumbled across—has served as a jumping off point for your fiction. It’s an unusual process.
  Hua: It reflects beyond just what I read in the news or covered as a reporter. It reflects what I was interested in. One of the stories in my collection [Deceit and Other Possibilities] involves a Korean missionary in Africa. I’d long been interested in the concept of non-white folks preaching the gospel abroad. That specific story was inspired by a conversation with a Korean friend who told me about his time in Somalia as a missionary. When I reimagined the conversation in fiction, I wondered, “What if the person trying to convert these people had an agenda?” So in the story it became a Korean-American pastor whose church is on the brink of financial failure and has pinned all his hopes on this trip.
  It’s never just one thing that impels me to write. It could be conversations, it could be news, or things like that, or just weird phenomena. When I first heard about it, the concept of Asian Americans going back to Hong Kong or Taiwan to get recording contracts fascinated me. Does that happen in India?
  Rumpus: It happens in Bollywood. Either full Indian or half-Indian/half-white women raised in the West will go back and take Bollywood by storm.
  Hua: I heard about it, thought it was really interesting, ending up writing a couple news features about it. But eventually I decided to visit it in fiction. I mean, it’s just completely fascinating to be so famous in the very country that your parents left, and then be totally anonymous here.
  It’s not just that China is full of opportunity. There are barriers in American society that might keep you from fulfilling your full potential. There’s this notion that immigration is one way when really in some ways it can be circular. And maybe in some ways it’s more circular than it’s ever been before.
  Rumpus: You started out as a journalist and have branched into fiction. Do you find the latter more satisfying?
  Vanessa: I need both. I wouldn’t choose one over the other. For me, journalism is still a way, if I’m curious about something, I can satisfy it immediately. The deadline is sooner, and it gets published more quickly. It gives me license to be out in the world. With fiction, it’s very satisfying to think deeply about the question “How can I make this character full?”—even if they’re a minor character. Fiction has a certain type of power. When you pick up the newspaper, you think, “Oh, I want to know what’s going on.” With fiction, you’re enjoying yourself. And not only are you enjoying yourself, but also getting a deeper understanding of another person’s experience.
  Rumpus: What are you working on now?
  Hua: A novel inspired by Chairman Mao. Despite all his rallying against the West, he had a troupe of teenage girls who would do ballroom dancing with him and other high-level officials as a form of relaxation. He also carried on affairs with them. Years ago, I watched some black-and-white footage showing these teenage girls dressed like bobby-soxers giggling around Chairman Mao. I was completely fascinated by that. And I started reading up on it and discovered there wasn’t much about them. There is one memoir by Chairman Mao’s doctor that mentions them. But there’s nothing from their point of view.
  So that gave me a certain kind of freedom. Where the record ended, I could kind of jump off. I could even imagine that a teenage revolutionary became Chairman Mao’s lover. Same thing with A River of Stars. The newspaper reports ended. And it was up to me as a fiction writer to imagine the rest.

• Vanessa Hua website - http://www.vanessahua.com/

  Vanessa Hua is an award-winning, best-selling author and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her novel, A River of Stars, which has just been released, has been called a "marvel" by O, The Oprah Magazine, and "delightful" by The Economist.Her short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, received an Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature and was a finalist for a California Book Award.
  For two decades, she has been writing about Asia and the diaspora, filing stories from China, Burma, Panama, South Korea, and Ecuador. She began her career at the Los Angeles Times before heading east to the Hartford Courant. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Newsweek, among other publications.
  A Bay Area native, she received a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan literary award, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. She is a graduate of Stanford University and UC Riverside's MFA program. Other achievements include the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Award for Civil Rights and Social Justice coverage; the Asian American Journalists Association’s National Journalism Award — online/broadcast, print, and radio; the Society of Professional Journalists, the James Madison Freedom of Information Award, the San Francisco Press Club Greater Bay Area Journalism Award, San Francisco Press Club, and Best of the West. She was the Featured Literary Artist at APAture, an Asian American arts festival in San Francisco, and her short story collection was El Cerrito's pick for One City, One Book.
  Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, Guernica, The Sun, and elsewhere. She received an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Words, a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a writer's residency at Hedgebrook, among other honors. She works and teaches at the Writers’ Grotto in San Francisco, and is on the faculty at the 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop.
  Find her work at your local independent bookstore, Indiebound, and other online retailers.

Hua, Vanessa: A RIVER OF STARS

Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Full Text:
Hua, Vanessa A RIVER OF STARS Ballantine (Adult Fiction) $27.00 4, 14 ISBN: 978-0-399-17878-8
A pregnant Chinese woman goes on the run in America to escape her controlling ex.
Scarlett never imagined she would find herself somewhere like Perfume Bay, a posh private accommodation for expectant Chinese mothers in Los Angeles. But when she gets pregnant with her boss's baby, and that baby turns out to be a boy, everything in her life changes in an instant. Boss Yeung will take no risks with the son he's always dreamed of...even if that son is illegitimate. Scarlett, who is used to working in factories and fending for herself, is not prepared for life among the pampered women at Perfume Bay who have come to America to secure citizenship for their children. When she finds out that Boss Yeung wants to pay her to give her baby up to his legitimate family, she finally decides to take her life back into her own hands and escape the claustrophobic Perfume Bay. But she doesn't anticipate being accompanied by Daisy, a spunky and occasionally obnoxious teenager whose parents sent her away when she got pregnant with her beloved boyfriend's baby. The two women escape north to San Francisco's Chinatown neighborhood, where they scrounge together food and money for themselves and their newborns--all while Boss Yeung gets closer and closer to tracking Scarlett down. This debut novel from Hua, who has previously published a collection of short stories (Deceit and Other Possibilities, 2016), paints a vivid picture of Scarlett and Daisy's unromantic and occasionally squalid, but nevertheless vibrant, life in Chinatown. Scarlett's fear of being discovered by Boss Yeung never fully dissipates, but it is ultimately overtaken by her fear of being discovered by American authorities who could deport her, and her constant paranoia is palpable. Unfortunately, the novel never fully capitalizes on its strengths. Boss Yeung's narrative is tedious, and Scarlett's lacks momentum. And the novel's saccharine ending undercuts its atmospheric successes.
A 21st-century immigrant story that, while intermittently intriguing, falls short of its potential.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hua, Vanessa: A RIVER OF STARS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723398/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=86074aa5. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723398

Anchors away; American fiction

The Economist. 428.9105 (Aug. 18, 2018): p72(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/

Full Text:
The streets of San Francisco
A River of Stars. By Vanessa Hua. Ballantine Books; 304 pages.
ONLY the wealthiest Chinese women make their way to Perfume Bay, a five-star secret compound near Los Angeles for expectant mothers. Here the spoiled wives of Shanghai bosses--all carrying prized male heirs--consume diets rich in superstition (no bananas, which cause babies to slip out early); schedule Caesareans on auspicious dates; and pick English names worthy of their princelings (perhaps Stanley, in honour of Morgan Stanley, or Warren, after Warren Buffett). In time they return home with the ultimate status symbol: a son with American citizenship.
Scarlett Chen, the Chinese heroine of "A River of Stars", Vanessa Hua's delightful first novel, is sent to this lavish prison by her married lover, Boss Yeung, who runs the factory in the Pearl River delta which she helps manage. But she flees when she learns that Boss Yeung wants to pay her off and bring up the child himself. She escapes with Daisy, a privileged 17-year-old ABC--American-born Chinese--who is hunting for her own child's father, a college student who has mysteriously disappeared.
The book follows the two women as they evade Boss Yeung's detectives and reinvent themselves with their new-born babies in San Francisco's Chinatown. For Scarlett, America is a land of promises and dreams. She knows that in China the illegitimate child of a single mother would be "second-class in every way". She lacks the connections to send her offspring to a good Chinese school. And even the most senior women in her factory were expected to serve tea and defer to men at meetings. America has its setbacks, but it is still a land of opportunity. Besides, the French fries smell as "golden as a day at the beach".
Ms Hua is a breezy, unfussy storyteller and an astute observer. She nicely captures some of the idiosyncrasies of American life as seen through a newcomer's eyes. Scarlett gawks at frozen Thanksgiving turkeys, "hard and gleaming as the decapitated head of a marble statue". She delights over her first slider (mini hamburger), noting that nothing signifies wealth and refinement "more than dining on toy-sized food".
The insights on parenthood are acute. Having a child pushes Scarlett to reconsider her own childhood, and to see her often harsh mother more compassionately. She becomes more aware of the fact that she--that everyone--will die. She had always known this, of course, "but until now, she'd never felt such desolation." Motherhood has contracted her life, "everything a blur except for a few metres around her, and yet how infinite, how intense the universe now seemed."
In the end, every narrative thread is tied in a cutesy bow. Yet a novel about foreigners coming to America with stars in their eyes and anchor babies in their wombs is bound to feel timely. Without wading into policy debates, Ms Hua dramatises the stories and contributions of immigrants who believe in grand ideals and strive to live up to them.
A River of Stars.
By Vanessa Hua.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Anchors away; American fiction." The Economist, 18 Aug. 2018, p. 72(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550424087/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c18008be. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A550424087

A River of Stars

Publishers Weekly. 265.19 (May 7, 2018): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Full Text:
A River of Stars
Vanessa Hua. Ballantine, $27 (320p) ISBN 9780-399-1787-88
In her skillful debut novel, Hua (Deceit and Other Possibilities: Stories), a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, introduces a strong heroine: fiercely independent Scarlett Chen. Scarlett, a factory clerk, fought her way to prosperity from the poverty of her native Chinese village and the clutches of her controlling mother. But when an affair with her married boss results in a pregnancy--and the ultrasound reveals the son he's always longed for--Boss Yeung sends Scarlett to Los Angeles to be cared for in a secret maternity home. Run by another clever woman, Mama Fang, the home caters to wealthy Chinese couples hoping to secure U.S. citizenship for their soon-to-be born children. It's there that Boss Yeung's true intentions (and his own considerable self-interest) are revealed. When Scarlett learns that the ultrasound was incorrect and she's in fact carrying a girl, she knows she must leave the home to save herself. Along with another young pregnant woman, she breaks free to scratch out an existence on the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown--a setup that is heartbreaking and, at turns, hilarious, as the two must remain undetected while they make their way across California. Hua wonderfully evokes the exigencies of lives at the margins of American culture by revealing Scarlett's enduring ingenuity as she navigates near-destitute single motherhood. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A River of Stars." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858648/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8515318c. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858648

Deceit and Other Possibilities

Terry Hong
Booklist. 112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p24.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/

Full Text:
Deceit and Other Possibilities. By Vanessa Hua. Sept. 2016.147p. Willow, paper, $18.95 (9780997199628).
Journalist Hua's debut in fiction is an intriguing collection of 10 stories with personal resonance from being the child of Chinese immigrants and a two-decade, continent-hopping career. Each of her protagonists is never quite grounded, caught between multiple cultures and countries. Each hides beneath layers of deceit, clinging to lies that enable survival. In "For What They Shared" and "Accepted," protagonists set literal fires, as if their deceptions might disappear in the flames. In "Loaves and Fishes" and "The Deal," two fallen men of God attempt desperate other-side-of-the-world tactics to recover their flocks. While chicanery destroys relationships in "Line, Please" and "The Shot," betrayal threatens marriages in "What We Have Is What We Need" and "Harte Lake." Hua's ability to imagine the detailed lives of her disparate characters, including a sex-scandal runaway, missionary saviors, and a lock-picking immigrant, gives her stories impact, despite a few jarring endings. Hua's collection pairs well with those of Mia Alvar, Violet Kupersmith, and Tania James. Winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and other honors, Hua is a writer to watch. --Terry Hong
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hong, Terry. "Deceit and Other Possibilities." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 24. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A460761626/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eb2eb61d. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460761626

"Hua, Vanessa: A RIVER OF STARS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723398/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=86074aa5. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018. "Anchors away; American fiction." The Economist, 18 Aug. 2018, p. 72(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550424087/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c18008be. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018. "A River of Stars." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858648/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8515318c. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018. Hong, Terry. "Deceit and Other Possibilities." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 24. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A460761626/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eb2eb61d. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

• Bustle
  https://www.bustle.com/p/a-river-of-stars-by-vanessa-hua-is-a-powerful-story-about-the-unique-challenges-of-immigrant-mothers-10001664
  Word count: 1931

  'A River Of Stars' By Vanessa Hua Is A Powerful Story About The Unique Challenges Of Immigrant Mothers
  ByE. Ce Miller
  a month ago

  Penguin Random House

  “If you’re of Chinese descent, “Ni cong nali lai?” is often the first or second question you get from another Chinese person: where are you from?” award-winning author Vanessa Hua, whose debut novel A River of Stars, tells Bustle. The novel takes readers from a factory in urban China to a rural Chinese village, all the way to the coast of California: into an off-the-books maternity home in Los Angeles, San Francisco’s Chinatown, and Silicon Valley. The answer to the question “where are you from?” is one that can — and does — determine the quality of life and opportunities of each of Hua’s characters.

  “Not just where are you from,” Hua says. “Where are your people from, where is your grandfather from? The birthplace of your ancestors was thought to reveal something about your temperament and your character. The question became trickier during the turmoil and migration of 20th century China. My parents both moved much during their childhoods, ahead of Japanese invaders and during the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists. Eventually, both of their families moved to the island of Taiwan. There, they grew up in the cities; my mother’s father was a judge, and my father’s father served as a naval officer and later as a school administrator.”
  "Where are your people from, where is your grandfather from? The birthplace of your ancestors was thought to reveal something about your temperament and your character."
  Hua herself is the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, and grew up in a predominantly white community in the eastern suburbs of San Francisco. “If we needed to stock up on groceries and go out for dim sum, we’d visit the Chinatowns in Oakland and San Francisco,” Hua says. “When I was a child, my maternal grandmother lived with us, helping raise me, my brother, and sister while my parents pursued demanding careers. For her, Chinatown must have been a welcome respite, a place where she could find familiar foods and dialects.”

  A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua, $20.76, Amazon
  San Francisco’s Chinatown is, in many ways, a welcome respite for Hua’s characters as well. Scarlett is an unwed mother, pregnant by the boss of the factory she worked at in China, and an aspiring America citizen who is in ever-increasing danger of overstaying her visa to the United States. Daisy is a pregnant teen and U.S. citizen who grew up abroad, in Taiwan. At the novel’s start, both women have been sent away to a secret maternity center in the United States called Perfume Bay, where they are expected to carry out their pregnancies thousands of miles away from the eyes (and judgements) of their families and communities.
  Though much of A River of Stars takes place in Chinatown, the novel also traverses the globe, taking readers to places as disparate as a remote Chinese neighborhood and a Silicon Valley hospital; San Francisco’s Mission District and a factory in urban China — following Hua’s interest in using her debut to explore, among other things, globalization.
  “Goods, services, and people moving across borders fascinate me,” the writer says. “Globalization is reflected in every aspect of life, in what we eat, what we buy, who we work for and who works for us. As a former business journalist, I’ve long been interested in the micro and the macro, in the forces that move people around the world.”

  “Goods, services, and people moving across borders fascinate me,” the writer says. “Globalization is reflected in every aspect of life, in what we eat, what we buy, who we work for and who works for us."
  Hua visited rural China herself for the first time in 2004, on a reporting trip in the Pearl River Delta, west of Hong Kong. “I visited a toy factory, whose goods were bound for export. I wondered what it felt like to be a mother working at the factory, who lived apart from her child most of the year, and once a year visited her village. I also wondered what they thought of the toys they were assembling, if they found them strange or bizarre. A few months after I returned, I was attending a friend’s baby shower. When she unwrapped a caterpillar rattle, I gasped. I’d seen that very model of toy under production in China, and I thought about the ways we are connected — the toy created and passed by hands from one end of the ocean to another.”

  Photo courtesy of Andria Lo

  A River of Stars zeroes in on the unique ways women, and mothers in particular, are affected by forces like those of immigration and globalization. Scarlett is in danger of becoming an undocumented immigrant — getting closer to the expiration of her tourist visa by the day, and fighting to gain citizenship in order to stay in the United States with her American-born child. This — Scarlett’s race against time — is a distinction that is critical to A River of Stars, and the ways Hua is adding her voice to the national dialogue about immigration.
  "...I thought about the ways we are connected — the toy created and passed by hands from one end of the ocean to another.”
  “The immigration debate in this country is dominated by the narrative that people are sneaking illegally over the southern border, on foot,” Hua says. “And yet, anywhere from 40 percent to two thirds of the people who are undocumented in this country came in on valid visas that they overstayed (and Scarlett is in danger of doing just that.) The immigration system is broken, but fixing with it won’t be as simple as building a wall. My novel explores these gray areas, that steep slope of precariousness.”

  I ask Hua if, when she began this novel, she could have imagined that her main character’s biggest fear — that she be forcibly separated from her child by the United States government, over her immigrant status — would have such national relevance?
  “We are a country of immigrants,” Hua says. “That’s our origin myth (even though our true history, of slavery, of lands stolen from Native Americans, is considerably more violent and devastating.) The story of immigration is as old as America, and yet as new as the latest arrival. The rising xenophobia under this presidential administration has made my novel and its concerns more timely and relevant than ever. Scarlett’s vigilance, her desperation and the ingenuity and luck necessary to remain with her child in this country — that all resonates with the plight of families today.”
  "The story of immigration is as old as America, and yet as new as the latest arrival."
  Throughout A River of Stars, Scarlett is constantly, exhaustingly, on guard. She doesn’t make a single decision without weighing its potential effects on her visa status, her risk of deportation, and the very real possibility of being separated from her child. Not only has she taken on the physical and emotional labor of new motherhood, she’s under the unending stress of trying to get her immigration papers in order as well.

  “Being on guard has served Scarlett all her life, but it’s also kept her at a distance from family, friends, and lovers,” Hua says. “But her solitary existence changes after she has a child, and after she immerses herself in the Chinatown community. She finds a home, a haven. Families who have been torn apart must feel bereft, and hopefully the work of activists, elected officials, and other supporters working to reunite them may help them know that they are not alone in their struggle. As Scarlett searches for a way to fix her papers, she’s well aware of the consequences if she doesn’t. Deportation, the threat of deportation, and getting wrenched apart from her child is always on her mind, while she attempts to navigate a new country and culture and earn a living to support her family.”
  The first person to break that distance Scarlett holds herself at is her fellow Perfume Bay-escapee, Daisy. Two very different characters, Scarlett and Daisy form a tenuous bond — first through their shared experience of being outsiders at the Perfume Bay maternity center, and then in the initial co-raising of their children. “When I first started writing about Daisy, I didn’t realize what a major part of the novel she would become,” Hua says. “But I’d been interested in exploring notions of citizenship, nationality, and identity, and the privilege that Daisy has by virtue of her birth in America, even though she grew up in Taiwan. It’s just the sort of freedom of movement, that potential for opportunity that Scarlett wants to preserve for her child. As I developed each character, I realized that Scarlett and Daisy could gain a greater understanding of one another — and of themselves — because of their differences. A kinship of sorts forms between them. They realize they might have more in common than at first glance.”

  That kinship also forms because of their shared experiences of early motherhood. “Motherhood can feel like traveling from one country to another, in which your leave behind one life and you must grow accustomed to the rituals and culture of a new one,” says Hua, who wrote A River of Stars while pregnant with twin sons. “Amid all these changes, you can’t help but wonder who you are, who you really were, and who you will be.”
  "Motherhood can feel like traveling from one country to another, in which your leave behind one life and you must grow accustomed to the rituals and culture of a new one."
  She also uses her characters to challenge popular portrayals of motherhood. "In the popular imagination, sometimes it seems the only portrayals of motherhood are white and middle class and educated, suburban and middle class and straight," Hua says. "Whether in my fiction or in my journalism, if I’m writing about race or motherhood or immigration and identity and more , I’m always trying to shine a light onto untold stories, and I hope that’s reflected in my novel."

  While Scarlett fights to stay in the United States legally, her child — by luck of birth — is already an American citizen. If Scarlett becomes an American citizen, it will be after a hard-won battle in the early-middle of her life — whereas citizenship will be all her child has ever known. I ask Hua if Scarlett’s America will be a different one from that in which her child grows up. “Now that I have children of my own, and am raising them in the town where I grew up, I’m able to see what has remained the same and what has changed,” Hua shares. “The country is much more diverse, compared to when I was growing up, but we still have far to go in terms of addressing socioeconomic and racial injustices and the environmental crisis. My children’s America will be determined in part by how we raise them, and there’s hope in that, in a future where we strive for equality and rights for all.”

• The Literary Review
  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-deceit-and-other-possibilities-by-vanessa-hua/
  Word count: 765

  A Review of Deceit and Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua
  Trevor Payne

  (Detroit, MI: Willow Books, 2016)
  My personal sense of racial identity is diffuse – I’m a half Ukrainian-quarter Scottish-quarter English Canadian, making me, I suppose, white – and my children are an even more complicated mix: divide my fractions by two and add in a half of Korean. However, through the quirk of geopolitical atavism, my daughter resembles my mother, whose black hair and Asian eyes are likely a result of the Mongol hordes having repeatedly crossed the Ural Mountains and overrun the plains of Eastern Europe. This lack of clear provenance is evident in my daughter’s answer to the question of “what she was” when she was young: half Korean, half Canadian, she said, tension lines appearing in her forehead. And so when I contemplate my children I see that they are one quantum step removed from a particular feeling of being counterfeit, alluded to in the title of Vanessa Hua’s new collection, Deceit And Other Possibilities—specifically the problem of self-definition caused by being Asian American, or perhaps more accurately stated, Asian and American.
  The stories escalated as I progressed through the collection, finishing with three exceptional pieces where the issue of race emerges organically out of the characters and situations. In these the compressed denouements poignantly accentuate the pretty stories the protagonists tell themselves to generate hope for the “other possibilities.” For instance, in ‘The Older The Ginger’ there is a seamless progression from abject fact to comforting fantasy orchestrated by Little Treasure, the young spinster in the Chinese backwater, whom Old Wu, at seventy-six, has come back to assess for a potential marriage (and green card). “Too much,” she tells him, after he relents and lets her into his deceased mother’s room, “Too much food, too much drink at the feast?…Granny said you had your own place, and that you ate all your meals in restaurants”—and then her envisioning of his American life turns to whimsy—“And you had a mansion…A new car every other year.” When Old Wu plays along, allowing himself finally to give in to the possibility inspired by the “powdered rhino horn,” which would explain why the tea Little Treasure served him from a thermos is so bitter, the sense is not of coercion, but acceptance—Little Treasure having proven to him she can participate in mutual illusion, making the thought of owning a BMW X5 or a home with white columns and fancy trim as real as the possibility of love.
  In the final story, “The Deal,” Hua presents a vision of the Korean-American evangelical phenomenon, describing the transubstantiation of human frailty into missionary zeal in the main character, the pastor David Noh. Hua impressively layers his psychology, showing the intricacy of his rationalizations. David knows he is in Africa nominally saving souls because the photo opportunities will allow for a marketing blitz that could save his church. David also knows, on some level, he arrived at this version of himself through failing as a history teacher and a poker playing dalliance that resulted in maxed out credit cards and missed rent payments. And on another level he is aware of the universal human capacity to read spiritual truth into coincidence and attribute the notion of God to a sensory experience—as easy as witnessing a shaft of sunlight expanding and filling his room after being fired by the prep school: “He no longer had to worry: he was in the Lord’s hands.” However, our impression of David’s character is more involved than this, as in the denouement I also had the sense that the confidence game David plays, not only on himself but on his wife and child, on the congregation and the African villagers he had hoped to be the one to bring to Jesus, is based to some degree on sincere faith, that the sight of “a flock of cranes [rising] from the lake…Necks extended, pointing like arrows to the heavens” really is for him proof of God, at least for a blinding moment.
  In these stories Hua presents an impressive range of specific characters, each illuminating in unique circumstances how the struggle to affirm identity is made trickier when one is an Asian minority in American culture. After all, we can’t entirely control how other people see us, just as we can’t entirely control how we see ourselves.

  | | |
  Trevor Payne teaches English at Radnor High School in suburban Philadelphia.

• Fiction Writers Review
  https://fictionwritersreview.com/review/deceit-and-other-possibilities-by-vanessa-hua/
  Word count: 748

  Reviews | September 28, 2016

  Deceit and Other Possibilities, by Vanessa Hua
  "Family, loyalty, love, lust: Vanessa Hua does justice to the big themes in this noteworthy debut."

  by Carolyn Gan
  Contrary to its title, Vanessa Hua’s debut collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities (Willow Publishing), is full of characters for whom deceit is really the only possibility. Each of her ten stories centers on an individual from one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s diverse immigrant communities: Chinese, Mexican, Korean, and Armenian, among others. As the saying goes, these characters do indeed “straddle two worlds.” But their duplicity isn’t just a life lived between the old world and the new; it’s between truth and treachery.
  As in a Confucian teaching, the deception often comes down to a lack of filial piety or moral character or both. While not all of the families in this book are Asian, most are, and their tales play on the well-worn “model minority” myth of sacrificing parents and children destined to become Ivy League-grads, engineers, and doctors. Yet while these narratives often start in a familiar place, they quickly enter new territory. There’s a sex scandal, a firebomb, and an act of terrorism in these pages. And the power in Hua’s work stems from her ability to negotiate her characters’ desperation. To what lengths might one go to right a wrong?
  Take “Accepted,” the story of rejected Stanford applicant Elaine Park. Like a lot of overachievers, Elaine has the perfect test scores, grades, and extracurriculars to get her admitted to the college of her parents’ dreams. Alas, her application is too typical, and she is rejected. “I’d been too honest, straightforward where I should have embellished, ordinary where I should have been fanciful,” she thinks. To save disappointing her parents, she decides to get fanciful by showing up on campus anyway, lying her way into a dorm room address, and auditing classes.
  If “Accepted” is the allegory of the filial daughter, then “Line, Please” is the tale of the wayward son. Kingsway Lee is a failed pre-med student, a lazy son always looking for a shortcut. He finds success as a Hong Kong heartthrob, the go-to guy for mediocre melodramas. Though he feels like a phony, Kingsway revels in the attention, especially the attention from women. He tempts the fates when he starts photographing his conquests. “I believed that someday, if—when—the cosmic prank ended and I reclaimed my destiny as a loser, I’d have the pictures to remind me of my time in the stars.” The result is a fall as meteoric as his rise and shame for his parents.
  Sex is everywhere here, and it’s a theme not often seen in stories about hardworking immigrant families. It’s at the possessive core of “What We Have Is What We Need,” as Papá cops a feel while Mamá cooks him dinner. It’s what seals the deal between Old Wu and Little Treasure, the 30-something maid desperate to marry up in “The Older the Ginger.” And it’s the wax wings of Kingsway’s Icarus-like fall; “To be wanted like that made me feel like a superhero, like I could fly or stop bullets with my hands,” he says.
  The tragedy of many of these stories is parental disappointment; the desire to remain faithful to one’s parents leads to a less authentic life. In “The Responsibility of Deceit,” a son goes to great lengths to hide his sexual orientation from his parents. “As much as I concealed from my parents,” he says, “I needed them to be there to hide from. Worse than any rejection would be their absence from my life.” It’s no wonder that deceit is the only choice in a world where a parent’s love depends on filial piety.
  Family, loyalty, love, lust: Vanessa Hua does justice to the big themes in this noteworthy debut. Yet she also succeeds by keeping it local; her city of San Francisco is a constant companion in these ten stories, lending her work authenticity and empathy. An award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Hua knows the immigrant communities that she writes about. She never resorts to ethnic caricatures. Instead, she writes her subjects’ stories as they must be told. Their choices, no matter how detrimental, are portrayed with understanding. And their deceptions, however dishonest, feel like the truth.

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  Word count: 1251

  December 12th, 2016, 01:22 pm
  Vanessa Hua's Deceit and Other Possibilities
  Deceit and Other Possibilities (Willow Books, 2016) is Vanessa Hua's debut collection of short stories, and the ten stories cover a range of characters with different experiences in and through the transnational links of Asian America.

  It's fitting that I finally sat down to write this review yesterday on an airplane bound for San Francisco because this collection felt very Californian to me in its selection of multiethnic characters and particularly the interplay of the individuals in their communities. The ethnoscape, to borrow Arjun Appadurai's term, is distinctively West Coast, especially for immigrant and middle class/professional Asian Americans and the second generation. The stories offer a sense of the perspectives, feelings, and experiences of Californians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

  The opening story, "Line, Please," drops us into a first-person narrative featuring Kingsway Lee, a Hong Kong pop star who is heading back to California where he grew up, on the tail of a sex photo scandal in which cell phone pictures of his many affairs with starlets and the leisure rich threaten his image and destroy his relationship with his girlfriend Viann. Kingsway is an unrepentant rake, fond of himself and his celebrity status in a way that belies his inability to grasp what his actions truly mean. The first line of the story, "Perhaps you've heard of me?" is both a brag and a flirtation, making you the reader complicit in his story that masquerades as a lament of his misfortune.

  While staying with his parents, lying low as the sex scandal blows over, he sees himself still as irresistible to women such as Jenny Lin, someone he grew up with and runs into on his visit, and even a woman who works at a foot massage clinic he visits. The story as a whole sketches out the world of Hong Kong celebrity scandal, pulling out a strand that seems to me specific to the age of greater movement across the Pacific, where American-born Chinese sometimes make their way to Hong Kong to find a celebrity life unavailable to them in the United States. (Of note, too, is the suggestion that Kingsway's family is not from Hong Kong but instead Taiwan, highlighting some of the complicated crossings of geography, region, and dialect that undermine any singular understanding of Chinese identity.)

  The second story, "Loaves and Fishes," takes a tangential storyline to the first. Pastor Alex Chan is on a flight to Hong Kong from San Francisco where he recognizes Kingsway, ostensibly on his return after the events of the first story. Pastor Alex is an evangelical Christian of the megachurch variety, and though he has faced some difficulties recently in his work, he sees this chance encounter with a fallen Kingsway as his opportunity to redeem himself and bring glory to God and his church if he can bring Kingsway into his fold. To accomplish this goal, he ends of sabotaging the flight in a show of quite twisted logic and a lack of concern for the consequences of his actions.

  Likewise, the final story in the collection, "The Deal," features another evangelical, Pastor David Noh, who leads a group on a mission to Africa to spread the gospel and save the heathen people of a remote village. The trip signals a moment of desperation for this Korean American pastor as he struggles to keep his ministry, Bountiful Abundance, afloat: "Bountiful Abundance had taken root among Korean American lawyers, software engineers, college students and activists, the children of immigrants: strivers, all. The church had a different style of worship, not so serious, not so Korean." The story sketches out the moral and religious world of Pastor David, a former high school wrestling coach and teacher, whose salvation and ultimate calling to do the work of God has led him to a mission that seems beset with failings at every turn. Although I am not familiar with the world of Asian American evangelical Christianity, I know that it is a vibrant community that explores the intersections of faith, race, and often immigrant generations quite pointedly. These two stories engage with the worldview of Asian American evangelicism, albeit from a perspective that questions more than affirms in mere platitudes.

  Of the stories collected in this book, the one that stands out the most is "What We Have Is What We Need" because it focuses on Mexican immigrants. This story, however, centers on similar tensions of family cohesion and a sense of impotent agency that pervade the other stories and dilemmas experienced by those other characters. The first-perosn narrator Lalo is a boy living with his parents in San Francisco while his other siblings remain in Mexico with their abuelita. On the one hand, there is the situation of the divided family across the border. And on the other hand, even within the ostensibly whole nuclear family unit subset in San Francisco (father, mother, and son), there is developing tension between the more working class masculinity of the father who is a locksmith and the aspirational, professionalizing mother who takes English language classes at a Latino social service agency and then joins the staff as a community liaison. Lalo's story reveals some of the ruptures that appear in the pursuit of the American Dream.

  The other stories provide interesting glimpses into the experiences of characters with various backgrounds. In "For What They Shared," a Chinese immigrant and an American born Chinese woman face each other at a distance across a divide manifested in the difference between the immigrant woman's family camping trip with her husband and in-laws and the Chinese American's outing with rowdy white American friends. In "The Responsbility of Deceit," a closeted gay Chinese American man vacations at a small bed and breakfast in Napa Valley with his boyfriend and runs into his parents' good friends. In "Accepted," Elaine Park is denied admission to Stanford but cannot face telling her parents and so embarks on a large-scale deception in which she crashes in the dorm room of a couple of other first-year students, audits classes, and even joins ROTC as if she were enrolled. This story draws out to absurd lengths the effects of the intense pressure faced by many Asian American youth to gain admission to elite colleges. In "The Shot," a mixed-race man named Sam faces relationship difficulties that become entangled in a confrontation he has with other men on a public golf course. In "The Older the Ginger," a Chinese American man in old age makes a long overdue visit to his mother in his home village in China, only to encounter deceit and avarice at the hands of the villagers who all desire his connections to America. And in "Harte Lake," a widowed Japanese American woman goes solo camping as penance and to memorialize her hsuband's death, with unforseen difficulties and resulting ruminations on what her marriage has meant.

  Overall, the stories weave a powerful web of insight into the lives of these Californians, and I think the collection would be an interesting one to read or teach alongside other California-based works. The stories do a wonderful job of teasing out the personal dilemmas faced by the characters while referencing and situating these individuals in the social context of Asian America.

  Note: I went to the same high school as Vanessa Hua!

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