Agreat many people, communities, and institutions have supported the completion of my debut collection. To Nidhi Pugalia, my editor, who helped shape these stories with me and understood them with a depth that I could not have imagined. To Clare Mao, my agent and champion, who believed in these stories from their beginning and helped me generate this collection and bring it out in the world. To the whole team at Penguin Books and Viking Books: quite literally a dream team, something I have only imagined from childhood.
In high school, I attended my first fiction workshop taught by Dave Eggers at 826 Valencia. Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida have been a source of support for over half my life: thank you so much. My gratitude to 826 Valencia for being a backbone to my writing life early on, as well as to Kundiman. My fiction mentor at Carnegie Mellon was Jane McCafferty—thank you. My gratitude to my poetry advisers and mentors, Alice Fulton, Terrance Hayes, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. Thank you to my students and mentees.
The New York Public Library Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers is where I first drafted these stories in 2016–2017—thank you to Lauren Goldenberg, Jean Strouse, and Paul Delaverdac for welcoming me to that unforgettable space, full of brilliant writers, scholars, and thinkers. I couldn’t have imagined realizing these stories without the Cullman Center! As the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington, I continued to work on this project, with advice from the incredible writer and mentor Edward P. Jones. The National Endowment for the Arts also supported this collection of stories, for which I received a (poetry) fellowship in 2021.
To those who read parts of this book and believed in it, lending their keen insight and words of support: C Pam Zhang, Ocean Vuong, Jane Wong, Cathy Linh Che, Thora Siemsen, Kyle Lucia Wu, Aisha Abdel Gawad, Alexandra Kleeman, Angela Flournoy, K-Ming Chang, Kelly Link, Gina Chung, Alexander Chee, and Vivian Hu. To Eugenia Leigh: I’m grateful for the lunch I had with you in September 2016, in which you encouraged me to write what would eventually become this book. To Karissa Chen for editing and publishing the first story in this collection in Hyphen magazine, to Soham Patel for editing and publishing “The Turtle Head Epidemic” in The Georgia Review. To Shelly Oria, who edited and published “The Fig Queen” for the anthology I Know What’s Best for You: Stories on Reproductive Freedom.
Thank you to the residencies where I’ve worked on this collection, without which I would not have written these tales. At the Anderson Center in Red Wing, I wrote several of these stories. At the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, I wrote the first draft of “The Haunting of Angel Island.” At the Ucross Foundation residency, I finished my second-to-last round of edits. At Millay Arts, I worked on my next round of edits. The value of the time and space I found in those spaces is boundless.
I am grateful also to the researchers, translators, and writers of the following texts, which were instrumental to the writing of these stories:
Koro: Clinical and Historical Developments of the Culturally Defined Genital Retraction Disorder, by Arabinda Narayan Chowdhury
Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative, by Rania Huntington
The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China, by Xiaofei Kang
Foxes in Chinese Supernatural Tales, by Fatima Y. Wu (dissertation)
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, by Pu Songling, translated by John Minford
Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America, by Erika Lee and Judy Yung
The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, by Julia Flynn Siler
Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940, edited by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung
And lastly, thank you to my family. To my grandmother, Juhua Wu, my father, Ming Mao, my mother, Hong Li, my cousin Ying Mao, and my aunts. To my marvelous friends, near and far: thank you for the good times, the bad times, the laughs, the cries, the laugh-cries. To Bo: thank you for being here.
To you, my reader, I am grateful beyond language. Thank you for holding this book.