About me

I was made in Taiwan to be an electrical engineer. In my twenties, for graduate school, I moved to Vancouver, Canada, and later New York City. After an almost-PhD in Decision Science, I experimented with acting, singing, and clowning before deciding very practically to be a writer.

Post the pandemic, my marriage with a good man ended amicably 25 years after we met. As is mandatory for a middle-aged divorcée, I traveled Bali and Peru and lived my version of Eat, Pray, Out-Of-Love.

My post-divorce adventure culminated in an ayahuasca ceremony near the Amazonian jungle, where for the first time I thanked my mother for giving me life and said goodbye to her forty-three years after she died giving birth to my sister (the true-life event that inspired my short story “Treasure Island Alley,” which was selected for Best American Short Stories 2023.)

Now, midway through the journey of my life, I find myself in Lisbon, Portugal–the fourth country I’m adopting and adopting me. I had wandered off a path, once again experiencing growing pains on my third and probably-not-final continent.  

Da-Lin is my writing alter-ego. It means, literally, Big Lin, which is my counter-reaction to a common Chinese practice of adding the prefix “small” to any surname to turn it into a diminutive. My birth name, in Chinese, is Lin Ching-Hua, which means a forest of green birch. My aspiration is to grow my work into a big forest, filled with wondrous creatures and their songs. Outside of writing, people call me Claire, which means a pond of oysters.

I explore time, death, and cultural clashes in my writing with a dash of weird.  I have won the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, the James Kirkwood Literary Award of UCLA, and a Pushcart Prize. My fiction has appeared in New England Review and Colorado Review, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and Best American Short Stories.

My work in progress includes a short story collection, a novel, and a memoir disguised as a self-help manual. Yeah, focus, I know.