About

I’m a lawyer, writer, and feminist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. My writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Iowa Review, Swamp Pink (formerly Crazyhorse), Lit Pub, December Magazine, Southeast Review, Cream City Review, ANMLY, Citron Review, California Law Review and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. My short fiction was selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2023 and my fiction and nonfiction have been nominated for the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and twice for the Pushcart Prize. I obtained my law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where I was also awarded the Eisner Prize in Prose, the university’s highest writing award, as an undergraduate. The first writing prize I ever won was for a short story about unicorns in the fourth grade.

My work has been supported by the Tin House Workshop, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ruby, and the Interdisciplinary Writers Lab at Kearny Street Workshops. I have also been a finalist for the 2024 Periplus Fellowship and placed on the longlist for Adroit Journal’s 2024 Veasna So Scholarship.

I have a laugh you can hear from a block away. I love soups and spicy noodle bowls and coconut desserts, and I’ve attended Corgi-Con too many times to count. I also own too many notebooks. My sharp toenails are always poking holes in my socks and I’ve been called feisty by a few people. Once I gave myself a concussion over-excitedly playing a cooking videogame with friends.

I write about the ferocity and liberation of women, modern alienation and loneliness, queer longing, diaspora, capitalism and its discontents, power games, and the delicacy and persistence of feeling. I’m proud to be Chinese-American.

As a lawyer, I’ve worked on gender and race discrimination, sexual assault, unpaid overtime and asylum cases. For the past four years, I’ve worked as a union lawyer, representing unions in court and before administrative agencies and advising them on organizing drives, legislation, and bargaining. After taking a year-long sabbatical from my law career to focus on writing and completing my first book, I recently returned to the practice of law as a worker-side employment lawyer at Franklin Law PC, representing workers in discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wage theft cases against their employers.

At Berkeley as a college student, I studied writing with Vikram Chandra, Melanie Abrams, and Thomas Farber. I also studied English literature (most notably, in a class entitled “The Banality of Evil”) with Namwali Serpell. Some of my favorite writers include James Baldwin, Rachel Kushner, Maxine Hong Kingston, David Mitchell, Rebecca Solnit, George Saunders and Alexander Chee.

Queers and other gender rebels are some of my favorite people, as are artists, activists, organizers, scholars, bookworms, gardeners and healers.

I’m a practicing Buddhist, and I credit my friends in sangha for helping me become happier, healthier, and less intolerable as a person.

I’m at work on my first novel and a short story collection. I do not currently have a literary agent. If you want to get in touch to chat about any of the above, I’d love it if you dropped a line.