I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.
Daniel Tam-Claiborne discusses his debut novel ‘Transplants’ at Hugo House on May 14th, 2025, in Seattle. Media: Zoe Gordon
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November 1, 2025: Daniel Tam-Claiborne
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Transplants, the debut novel by Daniel Tam-Claiborne, begins on a college campus in China in 2019. First we meet Lin, a Chinese student who is better with pets than people and excels in English, and then Liz, a Chinese American teacher who is “too Chinese for America, not Chinese enough here.” Lin doesn’t feel as if she belongs in China. Liz doesn’t feel as if she belongs anywhere.
Liz has arrived on campus from the suburbs of Ohio where her parents landed after they emigrated from China. At some point, her father left the family, and her mother died before she graduated.
Growing up, Liz knew she was different. She and her brother, Phil, were the only Asians at her high school in Akron. She got her eyes pulled, got called ugly names. She was told more than once to go back to a country she’d never been to, like the one she was born into somehow wasn’t hers to claim.
Lin, on the other hand, has arrived on campus from the next town over, which is where she grew up. Her father died in a mining accident when she was three. At the age of six, she could watch fish for hours but would run screaming from a knock on the door. “While her mother had always attributed Lin’s difference to something she was born with, Lin knew it was more circumstantial than anything else.”
Lin and Liz long to know who they are and where in the world they belong. Early in the novel, while Liz is teaching at the college, her ex-boyfriend asks if he can visit. She resists. “She didn’t want him to take away any more of what was hers.” Lin and Liz. Each a three letter name that begin with “Li.” Intentional, Daniel explains. He wanted them to be surrogates, which foreshadows the story to come.
Daniel’s prose is lovely. Take a look at this description of the college town. Notice the strong nouns and verbs and adjectives, the unusual “blistering scent.” It’s a description that is alive with smells and textures.
The air outside was acrid and still. Qixian was the heart of vinegar country where the dark liquid, pungent and thick, was bottled and shipped to every other province and exported abroad. But the factories had to compete with the coal mines, which operated from daybreak to dusk. It was only in the dead of night that the sky opened up, blooming with the blistering scent of tonic and salt.
Transplants takes place over a year that includes the late winter of 2020, which we reach about midway through the novel. At that point, Liz is in a Shanghai apartment staying with her friend Stephen. After lockdown, only essential trips are allowed: “grocery stores, factories, hospitals.”
[W]ithin days, other freedoms started to disappear. A man in the building across the street from Stephen’s had tested positive and, almost immediately, the whole complex was partitioned off like a construction site. Tall cranes came in to blanket the building in a fine mesh netting before wrapping it in plastic. Crews dressed in bio-hazard suits delivered shrink-wrapped food and water to the apartments’ occupants. Ambulances were parked outside, their sirens splitting the air.
Transplants was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. It was published by Regalo Press, which is distributed by Simon & Schuster. Regalo is a super cool publisher that with every deal makes a donation to the charity of the author’s choice.
Daniel was born and raised in Brooklyn with Chinese on his mother’s side and Anglo and Jewish on his father’s. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and has spent over five years living and working in Greater China. He currently serves as Deputy Director at The Serica Initiative, a nonprofit organization that amplifies the impact of the Asian diaspora in America. He is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and a recipient of a fellowship from the U.S. Fulbright Program. He is also the author of the story collection What Never Leaves, and he lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle.
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Come back on NOVEMBER 1st to read how DANIEL TAM-CLAIBORNE spends his days.
