Vanessa Hua

Vanessa Hua has reported on Asian diaspora communities for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she later wrote a column, and she has won the Asian American Journalists Association's national journalism award. Her fiction started with Deceit and Other Possibilities in 2016, a collection about immigrant families and their children negotiating a country that keeps shifting under them; Counterpoint reissued it in 2020 with further stories added. A National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a Steinbeck Fellowship have paid for stretches of her writing time. Forbidden City, out in 2022, follows a teenage villager drawn into Mao Zedong's inner circle in the years leading to the Cultural Revolution. Hua had begun it back in 2007, which makes it the earliest thing she wrote and the third of her books to reach print, after the 2018 novel A River of Stars.