To the Smolen family for allowing your son/brother to venture with me to China and Singapore and, despite my inability to remember a punch line or do conceptual math in my head, for encouraging me to continue the Smolen lineage.
To my earliest writing teachers—Mary Lyons, Peter Greer, Al Kildow—thank you for instilling in me a love for the written form and for encouraging my early attempts, no matter how overly wrought.
To my writing mentors, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Heidi Durrow, Josip Novakovich, and the kindnesses of so many writers who have read early drafts, chatted over coffee and wine, directed me to a needed book, resource, friend—writers and their craft do not exist in a vacuum and you provided me with the critical support and encouragement to stay an unlikely course.
To the communities and organizations that provided needed support, camaraderie, and on occasion, libations: School Year Abroad, the Let’s Go: China team from 1999-2002 (I still need to visit “Hotan”!), the Harvard-Yenching Fellowship, the Fulbright Foundation, the Forum for Chinese-American Exchange at Stanford, Bread Loaf, Disquiet International, USC’s East Asian Studies Center, UCSD’s MFA program, the UCSD Muir Writing Program, the Vermont Studio Center, and the SF Writers’ Grotto.
To Team Hippo: your writing insights, intelligence, and forgiveness (the late night calls with screaming baby in the background) know no bounds.
To the incredibly talented, loving friends who have always believed (even when I didn’t) this work would find its final form: thank you for not losing faith and never tiring of asking, “How’s the book?”
To Anne of Green Gables, Immortality, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Cold Mountain, Norwegian Wood, Divisidero, Both Sides Now, Magic Mountain, Wake Up Everybody, Holocene, and many more: thank you for existing in the world and on my shelves/in my ears/lungs.
… and to Joey and Calliope: they say “save the best for last,” but I don’t know who “they” are and why the best are last because in my mornings, my evenings, and my everything, you are always first and foremost. Thank you for being the first eyes I see in the morning and the last before we succumb to our dreaming selves. You remind me that while publishing this book and bringing this story to readers has been a struggle, there’s so much more than literature in this world that’s worth adventuring and fighting for. I can’t wait for the many shared wonders and journeys to come.
Empire of Glass Page 30