The Archive Project

In this episode of The Archive Project, we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a feast of a conversation about Chinese American cookbooks, cuisine, and the history of Chinatowns. The episode is entered on two great cookbooks released last year: Mooncakes and Milkbread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries by Kristina Cho, and Mister Jiu’s In Chinatown: Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food by chef Brandon Jew and writer Tienlon Ho. This trio came together with writer and editor Chris Ying to talk about their books, their experiences growing up Chinese American, and the role of Chinatowns.

There are vibrant Chinatowns in pretty much every major city in the world. The panel talks about the Chinatowns they knew growing up, and remember the iconic dishes of their upbringing. Their two cookbooks contain not only recipes but celebrate the history of Chinatowns and Chinese bakeries, respectively, and of Chinese American cooking.

Food and cooking and eating are so much about nostalgia and memory, but also about connection – not only back in time, but connecting people with each other. Chinatowns have been a vital part of creating that connection, through food, and it’s a treat to offer this conversation celebrating Chinese American cuisine.

Kristina Cho is a Bay Area–based food blogger, recipe developer, and cooking instructor. She’s originally from Cleveland, Ohio, where she grew up in her family’s Chinese restaurant. Cooking and sharing culture through food were always a huge part of her life. Before becoming a food blogger, Kristina studied and worked in architecture and interior design. Architecture instilled in her a designer’s attention to detail, a disciplined approach to iteration, and creative artistry. She has dedicated her professional career to making, teaching, writing about, and photographing her unique interpretations of Chinese food—everything from noodle soups to dumplings and, of course, baked goods.

Tienlon Ho (何天蘭) is a writer originally from Columbus, Ohio, where the best Chinese food was always in her family’s kitchen. She lives with Jon and Quin in San Francisco.

Brandon Jew (周英卓) is a native San Franciscan and the chef and co-owner with Anna Lee (the Missus) of Mister Jiu’s, a Chinese American restaurant in the heart of North America’s oldest Chinatown.

We are closing out season 8 of The Archive Project with the fourth episode in our series with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in which we have explored storytelling in the intersections of playwriting, theatre production, performance, and literature. This episode features playwright Mona Mansour and director Evren Odcikin discussing unseen, which had its West Coast premiere at OSF in summer 2022.

unseen follows an American conflict photographer who wakes up at the site of a massacre in Syria. The surreal experience leads her on a journey to piece together the details of her own family history, and explore the impact of our individual actions.

In this conversation, Mansour discusses how her personal identity as a Lebanese American informs her creative works, and the profound impact of sharing immigrant stories on American stages. Monsour’s plays ask nuanced questions about what it means to identify as “American,” and do the vital work of expanding our country’s mythologies to include widened perspectives. As we continue to emerge from two years of isolation and shuttered theatres and concert halls, witnessing art and hearing deeply human stories, together once more, will be essential for our collective connection and healing.

View more information about unseen on OSF’s website here: https://www.osfashland.org/en/productions/2022-plays/unseen.aspx

Mona Mansour is a Lebanese American playwright. Her plays include The Vagrant Trilogy, which will make its New York City debut in April 2022 at the Public Theater, directed by Mark Wing-Davey; the production was in technical rehearsals in March 2020 and was postponed due to Covid-19. unseen will have its West Coast debut at Oregon Shakespeare Festival in spring 2022, directed by Evren Odcikin. We Swim, We Talk, We Go To War premiered at SF’s Golden Thread in 2018 (dir. Odcikin). The Vagrant Trilogy was presented at Mosaic Theater in June 2018, (dir. Wing-Davey.) Of the trilogy: The Hour of Feeling (dir. Wing-Davey) premiered at the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and an Arabic translation was presented at NYU Abu Dhabi, as part of its Arab Voices Festival in 2016. Urge for Going: productions at the Public Theater (dir. Hal Brooks) and Golden Thread (dir. Odcikin). The Vagrant was commissioned by the Public and workshopped at the 2013 Sundance Theater Institute. The Way West: Labyrinth (dir. Mimi O’Donnell); Village Theater (dir. Christina Myatt); Steppenwolf (dir. Amy Morton); and Marin Theatre Company (dir. Hayley Finn).

Evren Odcikin is a theater director, writer, and arts administrator with a deep commitment to bringing historically-excluded stories and voices to the American stage. Odcikin is the Associate Artistic Director and Director of Artistic Programming at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a founding member of the MENA Theater Makers Alliance steering committee, and a founder of Maia Directors.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature a talk and conversation with Daniel James Brown from 2021. Brown is probably best known for his international bestseller The Boys in the Boat, first published in 2013. It tells a narrative history of nine working-class Americans who rowed their way to gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It’s a story of young men who persevere against immense challenges and long odds.

Brown joined us for Portland Arts & Lectures to talk about his next book Facing the Mountain, which shares many of the same themes and preoccupations as The Boys in the Boat, but also delves into a more complex and darker chapter in America’s history. Facing the Mountain tells stories of four World War II American soldiers, men of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team of the U.S. Army, a segregated, all-Japanese unit. They are all nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans, and volunteered to serve in combat, even as the federal government incarcerated many of their families in concentration camps.

As a writer, Brown occupies an unusual professional position: He is the teller of personal historic narratives, though he is neither a formal historian nor a novelist. In addition to being one of our great storytellers, Brown is a great listener, and his work is almost always a collaboration. In the case of Facing The Mountain, Brown collaborated with Tom Ikeda from the nonprofit Densho to learn the stories of Japanese Americans from this time period and to connect with the families and communities of those individuals whose stories are centered in the book.

After Brown’s talk, Ikeda joins him in conversation. We’ll also hear the voices of the four men featured in the book from interviews preserved on the Densho website. Read more about Densho: https://densho.org/about-densho/

 “I don’t really write ‘history,’ as I think of it, per se. I write personal stories that shed some light on a slice of history that I’m interested in, or that I think needs some light shed on it.”

Daniel James Brown is the author of Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II, The Indifferent Stars Above, Under a Flaming Sky, which was a finalist for the B&N Discover Great New Writers Award, and The Boys in the Boat, a New York Times bestselling book that was awarded the ALA’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. He has taught writing at San José State University and Stanford University. He lives outside Seattle.

Tom Ikeda is the founding Executive Director of Densho. Tom is a sansei (third generation Japanese American) who was born and raised in Seattle. Tom’s parents and grandparents were incarcerated during World War II at Minidoka, Idaho. In addition to leading the organization over the last 24 years, Tom has conducted more than 250 video-recorded, oral history interviews with Japanese Americans. Prior to working at Densho, Tom was a General Manager at Microsoft Corporation in the Multimedia Publishing Group. Tom has received numerous awards for his community and historical contributions, including the Humanities Washington Award for outstanding achievement in the public humanities, the National JACL Japanese American of the Biennium Award, the Microsoft Alumni Integral Fellows Award, the Japanese American National Museum Founder’s Award, and the Robert Gray Medal from the Washington State Historical Society.

“In America, patriotism and national identity aren’t contingent on race, religion, or ethnicity. That really is the whole point of America, in fact.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature Paul Theroux. Theroux is an iconic writer of over fifty books of fiction and nonfiction. Most of his work takes the form of travel writing–a genre he has helped define for the 20th and 21st centuries, as he traveled alone to some of the most remote parts of the world, writing about them with sensitivity, insight, wit, and wonder. He was a global citizen long before such a term existed.

It was his 1975 travelogue The Great Railway Bazaar, which recounted his passage by train from London to Southeast Asia by way of the Middle East and India, and back again on the Trans-Siberian Railway, which brought him to international prominence. In 1986 his novel The Mosquito Coast was adapted for a film starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. His most recent book is the 2021 novel Under the Wave at Waimea.

In this lecture from 1994, Theroux talks about the role of travel writing and how it differs from journalism. He describes how great travel books are imprinted with the author’s world view and offer us a time stamp of a given place at specific time. This last note struck us about this show (The Archive Project) itself, in the way it reveals authors at a particular moment in their career in the context of a particular time.

“Travel writing is a kind of biography of a place. It is a portrait of a place.”

“A [travel book] is not about the place as much as it is about the person who’s writing about the place.”

Paul Theroux is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

This episode of The Archive Project is the third in our partnership with Oregon Shakespeare Festival. This week we’ll explore the work and legacy of August Wilson, centered on OSF’s upcoming production of his one-man play, How I Learned What I Learned.

August Wilson was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American playwright. His work focuses on the joys and struggles of African Americans in the 20th century. He is perhaps most well-known for the ten-play American Century Cycle; each play focuses on African American life in Pittsburgh, his hometown, in a decade of the 20th century. The cycle includes Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which have both been made into recent feature films.

In this conversation, How I Learned What I Learned is described as a prelude or coda to the American Century Cycle. The autobiographical, one-man play is portrait of the playwright as a young man, the story of his coming up in Pittsburgh and his time with a group of poets and artists in his Hill District neighborhood. Hearing how the play came to be is delightful, and this conversation is a wonderful introduction to one of the most important playwrights in the history of American theater, and one whose work remains incredibly relevant.

In our episode, OSF artistic director, Nataki Garrett, leads a conversation with the director, Tim Bond; the one-man play’s star, Steven Anthony Jones; and Constanza Romero, costume designer and creative consultant on the play – and August Wilson’s wife from 1994 until his death in 2005. It’s a real privilege to listen in on this conversation between four people who are not only so deeply engaged with Wilson’s work and legacy, but who actually knew him, and share sweet and funny stories.

View more information about How I Learned What I Learned on OSF’s website here: https://www.osfashland.org/en/productions/2022-plays/how-i-learned-what-i-learned.aspx

Tim Bond is thrilled to return to OSF with How I Learned What I Learned, and has directed 7 of the 10 plays that comprise August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. During his 11 seasons as Associate Artistic Director at OSF he directed 12 productions. Tim was named Artistic Director of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in July of 2020, where he is directing August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean in April. Past leadership posts include Producing Artistic Director at Syracuse Stage, Artistic Director at Seattle Group Theatre, Artistic Director of The Paul Robeson Theatre, and Head of the Professional Actor Training Program at the University of Washington School of Drama. Tim has guest directed at many theatres nationally and internationally, including The Market Theatre (Johannesburg), Baxter Theatre Centre (Cape Town), The Guthrie Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Milwaukee Rep, Arena Stage, Cleveland Play House, Indiana Rep, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Arizona Theatre Company, Portland Center Stage, Dallas Theater Center, and A Contemporary Theatre (ACT). He is the recipient of two Backstage West Garland Awards, two Syracuse Area Live Theatre (SALT) Awards, and a Dallas-Fort Worth Critics Forum Award.

Nataki Garrett is the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s sixth artistic director. Since her appointment in April of 2019, she has guided the organization through numerous transitions and crises, all while building toward a more sustainable producing and fundraising model. Garrett’s forté and passion is fostering and developing new work, including those that adapt and devise new ways of performing the classics. She has directed and produced the world premieres of many well-known and important playwriting voices of our time, including Katori Hall, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Dominique Morriseau and Aziza Barnes. Garrett is a recipient of the first-ever Ammerman Prize for Directing, given by Arena Stage. She also received the National Endowment for the Arts and Theatre Communications Group Career Development Fellowship for Theatre Directors. She is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society and a member of the board of directors for Theatre Communications Group, a company member at Woolly Mammoth, and an advisory board member for Mixed Blood Theatre. Garrett is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in directing. Full bio here.

Steven Anthony Jones was the artistic director of the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre from 2011 to 2017. He has worked professionally on stage, television, and in film for 42 years. He has performed in the works of Wilson, (Charles) Fuller, Fugard, Stoppard, Gotanda, Beckett, Pinter, Molière, Shakespeare, Chekhov, and others. Most recently, he played Becker in the Broadway tour of August Wilson’s Jitney.

Constanza Romero is a costume designer and creative consultant. She has been the executor of the August Wilson Estate since 2005; has produced Wilson’s works, including: Jitney (Manhattan Theater Club) and Fences (Cort Theatre, with Denzel Washington, 2010); and was a key participant in Q&A’s with the cast for multiple screenings of the 2016 film of Fences at various U.S. cities. Romero is an associate artist for Signature Theatre Company’s August Wilson Series. In five season at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Romero has worked on The Liquid Plain, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Trip to Bountiful, Topdog/Underdog, Richard II, and The Comedy of Errors (OSF, Portland). She has an MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and has taught costume design at the University of Washington and scenic design at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature two virtual events form the 2021 Portland Book Festival with very different subjects, that take place nearly 1000 years apart, but that both feature powerful female protagonists and heroes changing their worlds. In the first half of our show, we feature Julia Cooke, author of Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am. She is in conversation with Amy Wang from The Oregonian in an event broadcast live from Powell’s Books in Portland. The evening of events was themed “Hidden Worlds,” and in Cooke’s book she takes us behind the scenes of one of the most important global enterprises of its day: Pan Am, the first modern-day international airline. Between 1966 and 1975, the airline and the women who staffed their flights played a crucial role in international affairs–especially in America’s role in Vietnam–far beyond what is commonly understood.

In the second half of our show, we feature Lauren Groff in an interview with Literary Arts’ Andrew Proctor. Groff is the author of six books of fiction. She rose to national recognition with her novel Fates and Furies, published in 2015. Groff joined us from Florida for this virtual event, broadcast from Annie Bloom’s Books in Portland. Her new book Matrix had been just been published, so Groff and Proctor talked about writing a novel that was a significant departure from her previous work—part historical fiction and part magic realism–and what motivated her to create a story entirely populated by female characters with a plot that could perhaps be best described as feminist revisionist history.

Julia Cooke‘s journalism has been published in Time, Smithsonian, and Condé Nast Traveler. She is the author of The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba, and the daughter of a former Pan Am executive. Her new book is Come Fly the World: The Jet Age Story of the Women of Pan Am.

Lauren Groff is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels and two short story collections. Her 2021 novel Matrix, which Esquire described as “Incandescent… a radiant work of imagination and accomplishment,” was a National Book Award finalist and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year. Her works have won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne. Groff is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and has been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. She lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband and two sons.

Andrew Proctor has been the director of Literary Arts since 2009. Born and raised in Canada, Proctor, earned a bachelor’s degree in English and Music at Concordia University in Montreal, and later worked in London for the Cultural Attaché to the Canadian High Commission. In the UK, he also earned an MA in English Literature at the University of East Anglia under the supervision of England’s then Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion. From 2000-2004 Proctor worked as an editor for HarperCollins in New York City and then as the Membership and Operations Director of the PEN American Center, a global literary and human rights organization focused on the welfare of writers and editors. In total, Proctor has worked in the literary world for over twenty years in the governmental, for profit and nonprofit sectors.

Amy Wang covers Oregon’s literary scene and writes a books newsletter for The Oregonian, where she is a staff editor. She previously was on the editing staff of The Philadelphia Inquirer. Amy has a degree in journalism from Columbia University.

In this episode, we share a The Archive Project exclusive: a collaboration with Oregon Symphony, featuring their Open Music program. Open Music is a new concert series in which composers featured in the classical subscription season offer a window into their spirit and creative process through an evening of music and conversation at an intimate venue in Portland.

In March, composer Missy Mazzoli joined the program. Time Out New York called Mazzoli “Brooklyn’s post-Millennial Mozart,” and she was recently commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to adapt George Saunders’s novel Lincoln In the Bardon. At Missy’s Open Music evening, one of the pieces featured was an aria, “Who Owns the Land?,” from her opera Proving Up, which is based on a story from Karen Russell’s collection Vampires In the Lemon Grove.

This intersection of music and literature seemed ripe for further discussion, so we gathered Missy, Karen, and Open Music host and Oregon Symphony creative chair Gabriel Kahane at Literary Arts in downtown Portland for a conversation about adaptation.

These are three creative geniuses, and it is moving to hear them explore the narrative strengths of both the page and the stage. They go beyond direct adaptation of a source text, touching on how media consumption becomes source material, and their relationship to that as artists – how something ends up translated from one medium to another. The conversation is a fascinating look into the creative process.

Missy Mazzoli has composed works for opera, orchestra, chamber ensemble, solo artists, vocal artists, and films. As a performer, Mazzoli is active as a pianist and keyboardist, and often performs with her band Victoire. Mazzoli’s works have been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Young People’s Chorus of New York, pianist Emanuel Ax, Kronos Quartet, and the Detroit Symphony, among others. Her music has also been performed globally by eighth blackbird, the New York City Opera, the Sydney Symphony, and the Minnesota Orchestra. Mazzoli received a B.M. in Music Composition from Boston University in 2002, and an M.M. in Music Composition from the Yale School of Music in 2006. She also participated in graduate studies at the Royal Conservatory of Den Haag in the Netherlands. Mazzoli joined the faculty at Mannes College of Music at The New School in 2013.

Karen Russell won the 2012 and the 2018 National Magazine Award for fiction, and her first novel, Swamplandia! (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also written Orange World and, most recently, Sleep Donation. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, the “5 under 35” prize from the National Book Foundation, the NYPL Young Lions Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and is a former fellow of the Cullman Center and the American Academy in Berlin. She currently holds the Endowed Chair at Texas State University’s MFA program, and lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son.

A singer-songwriter, pianist, and composer, Gabriel Kahane works at the blurred edges of journalism, ethnography, storytelling, and music. He is currently the Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony, which commissioned his 2018 oratorio, emergency shelter intake form. Over the last decade, Gabriel has worked in an array of diverse musical spaces. Memorable projects have included tours with Andrew Bird and Punch Brothers; recordings with Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, and Blake Mills; and an arrangement of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” written for Paul Simon’s Farewell Tour in 2018. As a composer, he has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Carnegie Hall. Gabriel is also a regular guest on American Public Media’s Live From Here with Chris Thile.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we celebrate Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month with a feast of a conversation about Chinese American cookbooks, cuisine, and the history of Chinatowns. The episode is entered on two great cookbooks released last year: Mooncakes and Milkbread: Sweet and Savory Recipes Inspired by Chinese Bakeries by Kristina Cho, and Mister Jiu’s In Chinatown: Recipes and Stories from the Birthplace of Chinese American Food by chef Brandon Jew and writer Tienlon Ho. This trio came together with writer and editor Chris Ying to talk about their books, their experiences growing up Chinese American, and the role of Chinatowns.

There are vibrant Chinatowns in pretty much every major city in the world. The panel talks about the Chinatowns they knew growing up, and remember the iconic dishes of their upbringing. Their two cookbooks contain not only recipes but celebrate the history of Chinatowns and Chinese bakeries, respectively, and of Chinese American cooking.

Food and cooking and eating are so much about nostalgia and memory, but also about connection – not only back in time, but connecting people with each other. Chinatowns have been a vital part of creating that connection, through food, and it’s a treat to offer this conversation celebrating Chinese American cuisine.

Kristina Cho is a Bay Area–based food blogger, recipe developer, and cooking instructor. She’s originally from Cleveland, Ohio, where she grew up in her family’s Chinese restaurant. Cooking and sharing culture through food were always a huge part of her life. Before becoming a food blogger, Kristina studied and worked in architecture and interior design. Architecture instilled in her a designer’s attention to detail, a disciplined approach to iteration, and creative artistry. She has dedicated her professional career to making, teaching, writing about, and photographing her unique interpretations of Chinese food—everything from noodle soups to dumplings and, of course, baked goods.

Tienlon Ho (何天蘭) is a writer originally from Columbus, Ohio, where the best Chinese food was always in her family’s kitchen. She lives with Jon and Quin in San Francisco.

Brandon Jew (周英卓) is a native San Franciscan and the chef and co-owner with Anna Lee (the Missus) of Mister Jiu’s, a Chinese American restaurant in the heart of North America’s oldest Chinatown.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we feature the novelist, Richard Powers. Powers is a writer whose work is difficult to define. It is literary fiction based in a kind of realism, but with elements of science fiction, fantasy, and highly original structural elements that keep readers a little off balance.

Powers won the National Book Award in 2006 for The Echo Maker. He is perhaps best known for his magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning and internationally best-selling 2019 novel, The Overstory. He joined us this year to also talk about his most recent book Bewilderment, which was published in fall 2021.

In his talked called, Easy Travel to Other Planets, which Powers describes as a kind of mini-autobiography, he recalls the facts and circumstances of his childhood, but also the life of his imagination as he grew up. The talk dives right to the heart of Powers’ craft, the mysterious origins of stories, including how Powers was shaped as an artist by watching the moon landing at the age of five.

After the live lecture, some audience members described it as one of the best Portland Arts & Lectures evenings they have ever attended. This is high praise for a series that’s been presenting for 38 years.

“More than any commodity that we humans chase after… we want meaning. Without meaning, all the rest is like drinking salt water: It just makes us thirstier. Something in us is desperate for connection to something out there. An adventure beyond ourselves.”

Richard Powers is the author of thirteen novels, including The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and spent over one year on the New York Times bestseller list. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award in 2006 for his novel The Echo Maker. Powers has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.

In 1989, an unknown writer named Amy Tan published a novel entitled The Joy Club, and the career of a major American writer was born.

In this episode of The Archive Project, we are reaching deep into the archive to 1991, when we hosted Tan because there’s something very special about hearing from a writer at the very beginning of their career. At the time, The Joy Luck Club had been on the New York Times bestseller list for two full years and the movie of the book was in development, with Tan as the writer and producer. There was lots of anticipation about what this writer would do next. Of course, Tan has gone on to have an incredible literary career, publishing half a dozen novels, including the bestseller The Bonesetter’s Daughter, books for children, nonfiction, and most recently a memoir called Where the Past Begins.

In this talk, Tan takes us back through her life to talk about her parents who immigrated from China in 1949, how Mandarin influenced the ways she wrote—and writes—in English, and how she “found her voice by not finding it.” She also talks about her early days first as a freelancer and novice fiction writer when someone told her, upon hearing the premise of the short story that would become The Joy Luck Club, that “no one wants to read about Chinese mothers.”  Of course, we now know that millions of readers in 35 counties actually did.

Amy Tan is the author of The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life, Saving Fish from Drowning, and two children’s books, The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat, which was adapted into a PBS television series. Tan was also a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and her work has been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives with her husband in San Francisco and New York.