Go Home!

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  CHAYA BABU is a Brooklyn-based writer, journalist, educator, and organizer. She was a 2016 BuzzFeed Emerging Writers Fellow and a 2015 Open City Fellow with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and her writing has also appeared in the Margins, Racialicious, the Feminist Wire, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Guardian, India Abroad, and elsewhere. Babu is currently pursuing her MFA in writing at Pratt Institute, and she is also editor at large at the Brooklyn Quarterly and a teaching artist with Community Word Project.

  GAIUTRA BAHADUR is a Guyanese American writer. Coolie Woman, her narrative history about indentured women, was shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize. Her essays appear in the anthologies Nonstop Metropolis and Living on the Edge of the World. She was named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard at thirty-two and has written for the New York Times Book Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Guardian, VQR, the Nation, Dissent, Ms. magazine, and elsewhere. She has won fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others.

  ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN is the author of the novel Harmless Like You. She is British, Japanese, Chinese, and American—hyphenation and ordering vary depending on the day. She has a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was an Asian American Writers’ Workshop fellow, and her short work has appeared in Granta, the Guardian, Guernica, Apogee, and the White Review, among other places. She has received residencies from the Gladstone Library and Hedgebrook.

  WO CHAN is a poet and performance artist. Chan is the author of the chapbook ORDER THE WORLD, MOM and has received honors from Poets House, Kundiman, Lambda Literary, Millay Colony of the Arts, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Chan has been published in VYM Magazine, Cortland Review, 92 Street Y, the Margins, No Tokens, and elsewhere. Chan is a member of the Brooklyn-based performance collective Switch N’ Play and has also directed the all–Asian American experimental theater piece WHITEFLAG/WHITEFACE, which debuted at the 2016 HOT! Festival at Dixon Place.

  ALEXANDER CHEE is the author of the national bestseller The Queen of the Night. His acclaimed debut novel, Edinburgh, was published in 2001. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor at large at VQR and LitHub, and a critic at large for the Los Angeles Times. His essays and stories have appeared in Best American Essays, the New York Times Book Review, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, NPR, and Out, among others. He is winner of the Whiting Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association. He is currently an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.

  KARISSA CHEN is the author of the chapbook Of Birds and Lovers. Her fiction and essays have been published in numerous publications, including Gulf Coast, PEN America, Guernica, and the Toast. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan and is a Kundiman and VONA/Voices fellow. She currently serves as the senior literature editor of Hyphen magazine and is a cofounding editor of Some Call It Ballin’.

  MARILYN CHIN was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of books of poems including Hard Love Province (winner of the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award), Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Dwarf Bamboo, and The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty, and the novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. Her awards include the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Stegner Fellowship, and the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, among others. She is featured in anthologies including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. Chin is professor emerita of San Diego State University and currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet-in-Residence at Smith College.

  MUNA GURUNG is a writer and educator based in Kathmandu, Nepal. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a teaching fellow. Her fiction, nonfiction, and translated works have appeared in the Margins, Himal Southasian, Words Without Borders, No Tokens, PIX Quarterly, and La.Lit. Muna was a 2015 Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellow and is the founder of KathaSatha, an initiative that fosters a storytelling culture in Nepal.

  KIMIKO HAHN, author of nine books, finds disparate sources give way to poetry—whether black lung disease in Volatile, Flaubert’s sex-tour in The Unbearable Heart, an exhumation in The Artist’s Daughter, or classical Japanese forms in The Narrow Road to the Interior. Rarified fields of science prompted her latest collections Toxic Flora and Brain Fever. Her most recent chapbook was Replendent Slug. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, and Shelley Memorial Prize. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY, and is the President of the Board for the Poetry Society of America.

  Born in Syria, MOHJA KAHF is a professor at the University of Arkansas. She is the author of the novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, and the book of poems E-mails from Scheherazade. Her second book of poetry, Hagar Poems, treats the story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah. She is a member of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement and a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement supporter.

  ALICE SOLA KIM lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in publications including Tin House, the Village Voice, Lenny Letter, McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed Reader, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award and has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.

  JASON KOO is the author of two collections of poetry, America’s Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island, and coeditor of the Brooklyn Poets Anthology. He has published poetry and prose in the Yale Review, Missouri Review, and Village Voice, among others, and won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and New York State Writers Institute. An assistant teaching professor of English at Quinnipiac University, Koo is the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets and creator of the Bridge. He lives in Brooklyn.

  AMITAVA KUMAR is the author of two novels and several works of nonfiction, including A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, described by the New York Times as “a perceptive and soulful . . . meditation on the global war on terror and its cultural and human repercussions.” His latest book is a novel, Immigrant, Montana. Kumar’s essay “Pyre,” in Granta, was chosen by Jonathan Franzen for The Best American Essays. He is a professor of English at Vassar College and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for nonfiction.

  CHANG-RAE LEE is the author of Native Speaker (winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Debut Fiction), A Gesture Life, Aloft, and On Such a Full Sea. Selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.

  T KIRA MADDEN is a writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Columbia Journal, the Kenyon Review, and Tin House online. She is a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook and serves as the founding editor in chief of No Tokens.

  Winner of 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Intro Journals Award and the 2014 Intro Prize in Poetry by Four Way Books for his first full-length collection The Taxidermist’s Cut, and recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, RAJIV MOHABIR received fellowships from the Home School, Voices of Our Nation’s Arts Foundation, Kundiman, and the American Institute of Indian Studies language program. His second volume of poetry, The Cowherd’s Son, won the 2015 Kundiman Prize. He received his MFA in poetry and translation from Queens College, CUNY, where he was editor in chief of the Ozone Park Literary Journal.

  MUHAMMAD AMIRUL BIN MUHAMAD is a Malay Singaporean student currently pursuing a degree in mass communication. He enjoys writing stories and listening to others when they tell him theirs. On his personal blog, Spinning Stop, he writes about a variety of things, including depression, love, nebulous apparitions, sex, and crying babies, am
ong others.

  FARIHA RÓISÍN is a writer living in Montréal. She has written for the Guardian, Vice, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times, as well as many other publications. She is also a cohost of two podcasts, Toronto International Film Festival’s Yo, Adrian, and Two Brown Girls, which reflects on the intersections of race and pop culture.

  SHARLENE TEO was born in Singapore and lives in London. She is completing a PhD in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Award. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize and holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program. In 2016 she won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award for Ponti, her first novel.

  JENNIFER TSENG is the author of two poetry books, The Man with My Face and Red Flower, White Flower. Her chapbook, Not so dear Jenny, won the Bateau Press Boom Chapbook Contest. Tseng’s debut novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, was a finalist for the New England Book Award, shortlisted for the PEN Robert Bingham Award for Debut Fiction, and has been featured in the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Financial Times, Elle, and elsewhere. She currently teaches for the Fine Arts Work Center’s summer and online writing programs, and for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.

  ESMÉ WEIJUN WANG is an essayist, the author of The Border of Paradise: A Novel, and the recipient of the 2016 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has been awarded the Sudler Award, Hopwood Award for Novel-in-Progress, and the Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Her work has appeared in Salon, Elle, Catapult, Hazlitt, the Believer, and Lenny Letter.

  WENDY XU is the author of Phrasis, winner of the 2016 Ottoline Prize, and You Are Not Dead. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Poetry, A Public Space, and widely elsewhere. Born in Shandong, China, she lives in New York City and serves as poetry editor for Hyperallergic.

  Acknowledgments

  First off, to my dear contributors—we are honored to have you in these pages.

  Thank you also to everybody who submitted to our open call. We received almost five hundred submissions and we were able to take on only a handful. There were so many brave and brilliant writers we were not able to accept. Thank you for your words and your time.

  We believe this book is unique and necessary, but there are works that lit our way. Three anthologies in particular come to mind. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, was the first great Asian American writing anthology. I remember flipping through the pages feeling a whole world open up to me. Good Girls Marry Doctors, edited by Piyali Bhattacharya, is a brilliant nonfiction collection of South Asian women writers. Piyali advised me when Go Home! was only a hope. She told me exactly how difficult and exactly how wonderful putting together an anthology would be. Without her guidance, I would not have known where to begin. The Good Immigrant, an essay collection edited by Nikesh Shukla, came out as I was editing Go Home! Seeing the work Nikesh has been doing with communities and to give voice to the unheard has been an inspiration.

  This project couldn’t have happened without the synergy of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and the Feminist Press. In 2015, AAWW adopted me as a fellow—little did they know I’d never leave them alone again. In particular, thank you, Ken Chen and Jyothi Natarajan. When I suggested this anthology to them they were so open and enthusiastic. Jyothi read, edited, advised, and cheered this project at every turn. I could not have done it without her. Thank you, Clarissa Wong, for reaching out to me from the Feminist Press. Thank you, Jisu Kim, for adopting this project and working so hard to help it come to pass. Your support, editorial eye, and vision were so necessary.

  I’d also like to thank the people in my personal life who aided and influenced the putting together of these pages. Thank you, Tony Fu, for always being there for me. Thank you, Kyla Cheung, for all our conversations. Thank you, Paul Hardwick, for the constant reassurance and kindness. Thank you to my brilliant agent, Lucy Luck, for all you do. Thank you to my family—my mother, father, brother, and in particular, to my grandmother, who fed, loved, and put a roof over my head so that I could be an AAWW fellow.

  Permissions

  “Mothers, Lock Up Your Daughters Because They Are Terrifying” by Alice Sola Kim first appeared in Tin House.

  “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears” from E-mails from Scheherazad by Mohja Kahf. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida.

  “The Place Where I Live Is Different Because I Live There” from You Are Not Dead by Wendy Xu. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013. Reprinted with permission of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

  “what do i make of my face / except” by Wo Chan first appeared in Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry and Poetics.

  “Aama, 1978” by Muna Gurung, first appeared in No Tokens.

  A version of “Meet a Muslim” by Fariha Róisín first appeared as “Growing Up Muslim in a Post-9/11 World” in Broadly.

  “Esmeralda” from In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar, compilation copyright © 2015 by Mia Alvar. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  “Tigress” by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan first appeared in the Harvard Review.

  “The Stained Veil” by Gaiutra Bahadur was first published by Commonwealth Writers on www.addastories.org. Verses by Kabir translated by Rajiv Mohabir.

  “I’m Charlie Tuna” from Man on Extremely Small Island by Jason Koo. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 2009. Reprinted with permission of C&R Press.

  “Bon Chul Koo and the Hall of Fame” from Man on Extremely Small Island by Jason Koo. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 2009. Reprinted with permission of C&R Press.

  “The Faintest Echo of Our Language,” copyright © 1993 by Chang-Rae Lee, first appeared in the New England Review.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  ROWAN HISAYO BUCHANAN is the author of the novel Harmless Like You. She has a BA from Columbia University, an MFA from the UW-Madison, and was an Asian American Writers’ Workshop fellow. Her short work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, Guernica, Apogee, and the White Review, among other places. She has received residencies from the Gladstone Library and Hedgebrook.

  ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS

  THE CRUNK FEMINIST COLLECTION

  Edited by Brittney C. Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Robin M. Boylorn

  For the Crunk Feminist Collective, their academic day jobs were lacking in conversations they actually wanted to have—relevant, real conversations about how race and gender politics intersect with pop culture and current events. To address this void, they started a blog. Now with an annual readership of nearly one million, their posts foster dialogue about activist methods, intersectionality, and sisterhood. And the writers’ personal identities—as black women; as sisters, daughters, and lovers; and as television watchers, sports fans, and music lovers—are never far from the discussion at hand.

  ROBIN M. BOYLORN is Assistant Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication at The University of Alabama. She received her Ph.D. from University of South Florida in 2009. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience (Peter Lang 2013), and co-editor of Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life (Left Coast Press 2014).

  BRITTNEY C. COOPER is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. Her book Race Women: Gender and the Making of a Black Public Intellectual Tradition (University of Illinois Press) examines the long history of Black
women’s thought leadership in the US, with a view toward reinvigorating contemporary scholarly and popular conversations about Black feminism. In addition to a weekly column on race and gender politics at Salon.com, her work and words have appeared at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Cosmo.com, TV Guide, the Los Angeles Times, Ebony.com, The Root.com, MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Show, All In With Chris Hayes, Disrupt with Karen Finney, and Third Rail on Al-Jazeera America, among many others. She is also a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, a popular feminist blog. In 2013 and 2014, she was named to the Root.com’s Root 100, an annual list of Top Black Influencers.

  SUSANA M. MORRIS is co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective and a contributing writer on the blog. She received her Ph.D. from Emory University and is currently Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her book, Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature, was published by the University of Virginia Press in February 2014.

  THE FEMINIST UTOPIA PROJECT:

  Fifty-Seven Visions of a Wildly Better Future

  Edited by Alexandra Brodsky and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff

  More than fifty powerful feminist voices imagine the world we could build together. Both visionary and touching, this exciting collection includes pieces from Lori Adelman on sex, Melissa Harris Perry on the promised land, Jill Soloway describes a hilarious woman-only commune, and Janet Mock envisions a world so safe that true happiness is attainable.

  ALEXANDRA BRODSKY is an editor at Feministing.com, student at Yale Law School, and co-founder of Know Your IX, a national student campaign against campus gender-based violence. Alexandra regularly writes about feminist law in publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Nation and has spoken about strengthening civil rights responses to gender-based violence on national television and radio programs and before the Senate.