MAY-LEE CHAI & MAI-LINH HONG: My Hungry Ghosts & Continental Drift

Local author and SFSU professor May-Lee Chai will be in conversation with fellow local author Mai-Linh Hong at Books Inc. Laurel Village
About this Event

May-Lee Chai and Mai-Linh Hong at Books Inc. will discuss their books My Hungry Ghosts and Continental Drift.

My Hungry Ghosts is a stunning essay collection that weaves memoir, history, prayer, and intuition together.

Continental Drift is the 2025 Trio Award winning poetry collection that honors and explores the geography that made and continues to shape Mai-Linh's ancestors' story, her own story, and the future story of her descendants.

May-lee Chai is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation including the 2022 short story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for The Story Prize; and Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories, which won a 2019 American Book Award; and her original translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards.She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and a Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Mai-Linh Hong is a poet and literary scholar. Her poetry has received support from Voices of Our Nation, Tin House, and Vermont Studio Center. Dr. Hong is coauthor and coeditor of The Auntie Sewing Squad Guide to Mask Making, Radical Care, and Racial Justice (University of California Press, 2021). Born in Vietnam and raised in Virginia, she teaches literature at the University of California, Merced.

More about My Hungry Ghosts:

Essays and Incantations: In this collection of timely essays and incantations, award-winning author May-lee Chai explores the intersection of world history and her own—feeding herself and her ghosts in the process.

Drawing upon the traditional Chinese Daoist and Buddhist concept of hungry ghosts, May-lee Chai writes about personal hauntings, the people, histories, ancestors, and family members who continue to touch her life. Hungry ghosts are spirits that are caught between realms forgotten by their descendants and separated from their ancestors. Yet the Chinese traditional celebration of the Hungry Ghost Festival in the 7th lunar month shows a path forward and a way to heal, when the living can still feed even the hungriest of the wandering spirits in this most egalitarian of holidays. This spiritual practice serves as inspiration in Chai’s writing.

In these 12 reflections and incantations, both new and previously published award-winning works, Chai explores Chinese spiritual traditions, the lunar almanac, exile and the diaspora born of war; weaves family stories with our society at large; examines the legacies of the “women of Nanjing” who were enslaved there by the Japanese military in World War II; and examines the racist fearmongering about Chinese men and white women and how that impacted her own multiracial family. Other topics of this wide-ranging collection include Western European-dominated beauty standards, the rise of authoritarianism in Hong Kong leading to mass migration, the extinction of the Yangzi River dolphin due to climate change, and Chai’s complex relationship with her white mother.

Spanning continents and centuries, My Hungry Ghosts: Essays and Incantations is a collection that speaks to our current political moment with fresh and innovative forms of writing. Chai’s essays provide a lens and path forward for activism and healing.

“May-lee Chai’s My Hungry Ghosts: Essays and Incantations is a searching meditation on life, identity, place, and belonging. Her story, a unique yet universal one, moves through geographic displacement, family trauma, war, and the ambient racism that insinuates itself into the lives and psyches of Asian and Asian American neighbors, coworkers, and friends. And still, Chai writes a life once relegated to the margins into the center of selfhood, repair, and restoration—for herself and her family. As Chai pieces together the traumas of both sides of her family, she moves toward self-understanding and full embodiment, finding her way to the only home that is real and true and safe: the one that lives inside of us.”—Deborah Douglas, author of the Moon U.S. Civil Rights Trail: A Traveler's Guide to the People, Places, and Events That Made the Movement and founding co–editor-in-chief of The Emancipator

“My Hungry Ghosts is an insightful, compelling collection of essays that demonstrate how histories driven by war and geopolitical conflict are passed down across generations and borders, how prejudicial traumas evolve across limbs of family trees, the powerful fragmented toll of memory, and the need to define one's own identity as a critical means towards survival.”—José Vadi, author of Inter State: Essays from California and Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens

“May-lee Chai is a vital voice, telling authentic Asian American stories with complexity and heart.”—Curtis Chin, author of the national bestseller Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, a Stonewall Honor Book

More about Continental Drift:

From Vietnam to Virginia, California to Thailand, Hong plumbs the fault lines, crosses the oceans, crystallizing moments into meaning. Whether luxuriating in the small joys of nature and of existence, or marveling at the process of geological shift, these artfully crafted poems bring the reader into the complex promises and griefs of migration, navigation, and claiming space in a postcolonial world. "To survive is to refuse / death, but how / to tell refusal from retreat?"

"These expansive poems remind us of the ways that language can transform us, mapping geographies of wonder, startlingly sumptuous and alive in their clarity." -Cathy Linh Che, author of Becoming Ghost
"These poems dance on the page." -Shailja Patel, author of Migritude
"Continental Drift is the record… of poetry as proprioception; synchronizing movement and migration; sometimes sacrificial, sometimes seismic, always open and, however painfully, ongoing." -Brandon Shimoda, author of The Afterlife Is Letting Go
"Like loss, like shifting tectonic plates, [Continental Drift] reshapes you-slowly, irrevocably, and down to the bone."-Sierra DeMulder, author of Ephemera