Join Mrs. Dalloway’s (Berkeley, CA) on Tuesday May 28th at 7:00 PM when author Wei Tchou comes to the store to share her deeply personal memoir Little Seed. Wei will read from and discuss her book, in conversation with Jay Caspian Kang, and will sign copies after the presentation.
"Little Seed is what I want the future of literature to be." —Sam Cohen, author of Sarahland
Little Seed is an experimental memoir that braids together the narrative of the author's relationship with her brother and family with a deeply personal field guide to ferns.
The chapters move associatively, commenting on each other indirectly and drawing out questions of assimilation, race, class, gender, nature and the general problem of being and knowing. When the author's brother has a psychotic break, the rigid structure of the book itself breaks apart and the protagonist adventures to the cloud forest of Oaxaca in order to truly live: to know the world by experiencing it rather than reading about it or following the direction of others. Some persistent themes throughout the book: What does it mean to be Chinese? What is love and how best to love? What really is a fern?
Wei Tchou's essays and reporting can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Oxford American, among other publications. She likes to write about food, nature, and the complications of identity. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and has an MFA from Hunter College. She lives in New York City, where she is tending a lemon tree.
Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. His other work has appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and on This American Life and Vice, where he worked as an Emmy-nominated correspondent. He is the author of the novel The Dead Do Not Improve, and The Loneliest Americans.