"Each of us has been uprooted from one place and, through a great series of chance and circumstance not entirely our own, been made to reinvent ourselves somewhere else." Transplants, the first novel by Daniel Tam-Claiborne, is a mesmerizing study of the immigrant experience told with warmth, nuance, and quiet beauty.
Chapters alternate between the perspectives of Lin He, a college student in China, and Liz Chen, a Chinese American teacher of the English language. Lin, who has long felt more kinship with her pets than with other people, yearns for both independence and a sense of belonging. Liz, grieving her mother's death, realizes "that if she never set foot in China, there would always be a part of her she'd never fully understand." After meeting on a campus in Qixian, the two women build a friendship and unexpectedly trade places: Lin travels to the U.S. to attend college in Ohio and Liz chooses to remain in China to trace her family's roots.
The novel takes place over the course of a year, part of which is intersected by a viral pandemic and lockdown. Tam-Claiborne unflinchingly addresses the xenophobia and violence experienced by many Chinese Americans during this time and examines the conundrum faced by many immigrants: "Lin had done everything right--learned the language, kept her head down, followed the rules--and had still been met with cruelty."
Transplants, though set during a horrifying time in history, is a story of hope, strength, and resilience. --Grace Rajendran, freelance reviewer