FOR THEIR EXCELLENT readings that helped me to shape this novel, thank you to Sarah Sheffield, Shauna Seliy, Patrick Merla, Kirsten Bakis, Emily Barton, Patrick Nolan, Karl Soehnlein, Julie Regan, Sandell Morse, Betty Rogers, Caleb Crain, my brother, Christopher, my sister, Stephanie, and my brother-in-law, Adam Barea. For her unalloyed support for this novel and for her advice, thank you to Hanya Yanagihara. Thank you to Quang Bao, for his support for the novel and his efforts on my behalf. For their beautiful example in persistence, thank you to my mother, Jane Chee, and to my departed father, Choung Tai Chee. For their assistance, without which this book could not have appeared, thank you to Frank Conroy and Connie Brothers, to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Michener/Copernicus Society, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and to Donna Brodie and the Writers’ Room of New York City. Special thanks to my aunt and uncle, Priscilla and Brian St. Louis, for the use of their barn, and to Katie MacNichol, for her long friendship to me and to this effort. Thank you to my teachers, especially Kit Reed, Annie Dillard, Beatrix Gates, Mary Robison, James Alan McPherson, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Benedict, Denis Johnson, and Deborah Eisenberg. Thank you to Elaine Kim, Tricia Juhn, Mina Park, and all the members of the dinner workshop. Thank you to Rebecca Kurson of Liza Dawson Associates, my agent, and to Chuck Kim, my editor, for having the vision to publish this book. Thanks also to John Weber, Karyn Slutsky, Michele Rubin, Caroline Dennehy, Fritz Metsch, Christian Dierig, and Laura Jorstad, for their excellent work on the novel’s behalf. And for my website, thank you to D.J. Paris.
This novel is a work of fiction, invented and imagined. A resemblance of the characters to people living or dead, and to situations from history, if it happens, will be largely a function of a synchronicity between the imagination of the writer and the life of the reader. I would acknowledge there is a boy I did not know, who did set himself on fire in my hometown when I was too young to remember fully, and the faint memory of which haunted me until I wrote this. His story is inviolate, and not here.