May lee Chai

Novels

Her novels include My Lucky Face (1997), about a Chinese woman in Nanjing balancing work, family, and a tough new job assignment taking care of a foreign teacher; Dragon Chica (2001), about Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge starting over in Texas and Nebraska; and its sequel, Tiger Girl (2013).

Nonfiction Books

Her nonfiction books include the family memoir, The Girl from Purple Mountain (2002), which was co-written with her father, the political scientist Winberg Chai. The book, which is narrated in alternating chapters by May-lee and her father, details her grandmother’s decision to be buried alone after helping her family to escape to America after the Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Civil War.

Scholar Rocio G. Davis has noted that the metaliterary interaction of the dual father-daughter narrators and their arguments about the past in The Girl from Purple Mountain becomes a theme in the memoir, exploring the complex reasons related to trauma, memory, and the passage of time that events and stories are experienced and remembered differently by various members within a family.

Chai’s other memoir, Hapa Girl (2007), explores violent reactions towards her mixed-race family in a small Midwestern town in the 1980s. Chai's writing in Hapa Girl has also been noted for its use of culinary metaphors as part of an Asian American narrative about food and identity.

Chai also published a short story and essay collection, Glamorous Asians (2004), and co-authored a book about changes in contemporary Chinese society, China A to Z (2014, 2nd Ed.), and translated the 1934 autobiography of Chinese author, Ba Jin (2008).

Short Stories and Essays

Chai's short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, The Denver Post, Gulf Coast, Jakarta Post Weekender, Many Mountains Moving, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Seventeen, Southwest Magazine, and ZYZZYVA.

Education

1989 – B.A. majoring in French and Chinese Studies from Grinnell College

1992 – M.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University

1994 – M.A. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Colorado-Boulder

2013 – M.F.A. from San Francisco State University

Awards and Honors

Tiger Girl – 2014 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Best Young Novel from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA)

Hapa Girl – 2008 Kiriyama Prize Notable Book

Hapa Girl – Honorable Mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights

2006 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose