Daniel Tam-Claiborne is familiar with the spaces in between. As a multiracial Chinese American teaching English in rural China, he brought an outsider’s attunement to the people and places he encountered, paying special attention to the power dynamics between expats and locals, teachers and students, men and women. His desire to make sense of this experience led him, after an early interest in poetry, to start writing fiction. It was in the capaciousness of the form that he found room to explore, expand, and “challenge [his] own inclinations as a writer.”
Tam-Claiborne’s debut novel, Transplants, is an exquisitely observed journey across continents and identities. Two young women—Liz, a Chinese American teacher seeking to augment gaps in her family history, and Lin, an eccentric Chinese undergrad who longs to feel at home in the world—befriend each other on the cusp of a global health crisis. Their twin migrations across China and the US highlight the differences that divide not just nations and cultures but individuals of the same race; at the same time, migration catalyzes bonds that ultimately transcend such differences.
Daniel and I met a few years ago through a writing network. Recently, I caught up with him mid-book tour for a video chat about migration, identity, and the possibilities of Asian diasporic solidarity.
[This interview has been edited for clarity and length.]
Doris W. Cheng: In your book, neither protagonist feels as if they belong in their country of birth. Lin is Chinese and doesn’t fit into a culture that values conformity. Liz is the American daughter of Chinese immigrants, whose broken family threads leave her with a sense of emptiness. What does migrating to a new land offer each of them?
Daniel Tam-Claiborne: The epigraph I use in the book contends that to migrate is to disappear, to lose yourself—but in doing so, you find yourself. You’re reborn, and the old way of being is lost forever. I feel like there is enormous possibility in the reinvention that can happen, the sense that our identity is shaped not only by how we see ourselves but how we’re perceived by others and by society.
DWC: You write about Lin, “In a society that valued the whole, she’d been trapped by the limitations of what she, as an individual, could do.” America holds the promise of freedom, a place where, as Liz tells her, “everyone is free to be themselves.” But what does freedom mean, for someone like her and for Americans as a whole?
DTC: In each place, there are very distinct ideas of what freedom means. COVID is a good example of this. Liz comes out of quarantine thinking China is the freest place she has ever lived. The whole world is locked down, and yet she has incredible autonomy over what she is doing and how she’s traveling, even though, of course, all of her movements are being tracked, even though she’s being surveilled, even though there are individual liberties that are being sacrificed for the sake of keeping up this freedom. Whereas in America, it’s quite the opposite. There, freedom is defined as an individual’s ability to do what they please, irrespective of the way it infringes or imposes upon their fellow Americans.
DWC: Liz’s Chinese boyfriend reminds her that the US had its own “patriotic education campaign,” a point that feels very resonant at this political moment.
DTC: Absolutely.
DWC: I notice the men do not acquit themselves well. Travis and the other English teachers are boors, Liz’s brother Phil is self-centered and self-hating, and their father not only abandoned them, he falsely blamed his wife for his own writing criticizing the Chinese government. Liz thinks “to be a Chinese woman was to suffer for a man’s greed.” Lin observes, “She was destined to be punished by a man for something she couldn’t control.” What led you to write these women protagonists?
DTC: Growing up with a single mom and a younger sister, I’ve always seen the world through their lenses. I wanted to provide visibility into an experience that felt very invisible, the toxic male culture around expat foreign teachers in China, in order to see some of the inequities within power dynamics that I didn’t really have the words for. But of course, I don’t think we end up writing answers in the works that we produce.
DWC: It’s more about writing the question, isn’t it?
DTC: Exactly. I wanted to give these characters a degree of agency. It would have been very easy to fall into stereotypical roles, and I wanted to complicate those. So Lin has a fair amount of autonomy and agency when it comes to starting a relationship with Travis, and that was very intentional. Liz, for her part, also has a lot of selfish motivations, and her relationship with Lin ends up becoming more fraught and complicated as a result. What I was trying to do was not present these female protagonists as one-dimensional. But I also wanted to give the male characters some degree of reconciliation as well. Some of the actions they take are justifiable in their own heads. I wanted to show that they are making decisions based on the kinds of worlds in which they’ve been brought up.
DWC: Your prose is beautiful and precise. There is such a strong sense of place, particularly in China, the rural towns, the cities. Both women take parallel journeys—Lin across the U.S., Liz through China to the North Korean border, then to Shanghai. Why is it important for them to traverse such spans of their adopted countries?
DTC: My own experience growing up was so sheltered that it was easy to write the experience of being a stranger in one’s own country. I, too, was awestruck and baffled and confounded by so many aspects of American life when I had the opportunity to see more of the country outside the Northeast. I wanted to write a narrative that wasn’t centered on big cities—a more textured, or holistic, sense of what both of these countries look like. For a novel grappling with ideas about nationalism and geopolitical relationships, I had a responsibility not to paint these two countries as monoliths.
DWC: There’s tension between the Chinese-born immigrants and the Chinese diaspora, or huayi. At Cuyahoga Community College, the Chinese American Alliance tells Lin she’s not welcome—the club is only for Americans of Chinese descent. One woman says, “My family worked their asses off so I could be here. Not like these new immigrants with their Gucci bags and Lamborghinis.” The fact that some Chinese Americans look down on Chinese immigrants, and vice versa, makes it clear they have nothing in common. I’m curious, what possibilities do you see today for community and solidarity?
DTC: It’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. These dynamics became much more pronounced to me during the pandemic, and I saw that sentiment reflected in my own family. Folks like my mom, who has been in this country for a long time, suddenly blaming newer Chinese immigrants and saying, These new immigrants are the problem. We did things the right way, they’re getting off easy. And here they are bringing this virus and making all of us look bad by association. I had a very naive idea of—if not necessarily pan-Asian, certainly pan-Chinese—solidarity, that we gain a lot more together than we do apart. We’re already getting stigmatized by outside forces, whether it’s patriarchy or white nationalism. The last thing we need is for our own community to make it easier for them.
DWC: My mom is the same. She’s a Taiwanese immigrant, and when she votes, she’s not thinking about community.
DTC: It’s hard to talk about inter-Asian dynamics in this way. But I felt like I would not do justice to writing about this community without recognizing some of its warts. Lin and Liz represent two different sides of the Chinese diasporic spectrum, and a group we might see at first glance as being the same actually holds an enormous amount of disagreement and volatility.
DWC: Do experiences like Liz and Lin’s open up opportunities for these kinds of dynamics to evolve?
DTC: Part of my desire in writing this book was to show how even our fiercest differences might bring us closer together. I tend to have a cynical view about a lot of things. It would have been easier, I think, to write a book that stayed negative, especially given some of the content—anti-Asian hate, COVID. But, ultimately, I wanted to be proven wrong. These characters go through a lot, but they stay resilient. And through them, I began to feel a degree of hopefulness about the future, too.
