Writer. Wanderer. Wonderer.
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New England Review, Vol 43, No. 3 (2022)
Treasure Island Alley
Read more(Selected by Min Jin Lee for Best American Short Stories 2023)
The mourning women are howling. Even with fingers in her ears, Xuan-Xuan hears their loud cries from the big white tent that appeared overnight in the alley. On tiptoe, she peers over the windowsill and looks down three stories to the long line of people holding incense sticks outside the tent. They were here to pay their respects, they said. Her mama had died last night giving birth to a baby, a sister, they said. Her sister would come home but her mama would not, they said, but Xuan-Xuan has her own ideas. -
Colorado Review, Vol 49.2, Summer 2022
The Future Knows
Read moreMaybe it was because of the fights between Mom and Dad, about the land he bought outside Taipei without asking her…Or it could have been because of Tiananmen Square, the student protestors and the Tank Man, who occupied our young hearts with democratic fervor and patriotic lust…Or maybe it was because of the kidnapping of the daughter of White Jade Jade. For weeks, everyone in Taiwan followed the search for the famous singer’s daughter, who was twelve, same as me. So close was she to our age—my sister Lili was ten and Fenfung, fourteen—that we felt as if we ourselves were lost. Whatever the reason, no one—not me, not my sisters, and certainly not my parents distracted by their own cold war—noticed the first time my peculiar and short-lived power manifested itself so many years ago…
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Awards and accolades
PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow & James Kirkwood Literary Prize Winner
“Da-Lin’s voice is bold and free and assured. In her stories, time and space are not obstacles but conduits, tunnels through which her prose, her eye, and her mind move with ease and velocity, touching down lightly on a moment here, a detail there. These moments and details accumulate into worlds that are weird and tactile, full of smells and sounds and particulars.Her writing is sharp and alive weaving the micro and the macro, the personal and the historical, the sensory and the conceptual into an original voice.”
Charles Yu, National Book Award winner, author of Interior Chinatown
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Da-lin's electric "Treasure Island Alley" hopscotches across space and time to deliver a stunning, innovative story of a young girl's grief.
Heidi PitlorEditor, Best American Short Stories -
"What a terrific story "Treasure Island Alley" is! We just love the fearless way it moves around in time, and yet with a real sense of purpose, a deep search for nothing less than the meaning of death."
Carolyn KueblerEditor, New England Review -
""The Future Knows" packs a lot into fourteen pages and leaves the reader with a collection of memorable impressions about this world Da-Lin so sharply creates."
Steven Schwartz Fiction Editor, Colorado Review -
":...wild, true, edgy, vibrant, utterly compelling...The Absolutely True Memoir of a Sometime Dictator's Maybe Granddaughter is a unique and profoundly layered meditation on history, life stories, Taiwan, the collisions of histories and intimate life..."
Carolina De RobertisAuthor of The President and the Frog
“At the heart of my writing is a love story for Taiwan, the birthplace I once rejected, and for the imperfect strivings and exquisite pain of people caught in tragedies both political and personal…”