Swimming in Hong Kong – by Stephanie Han
Stephanie Han’s award-winning stories cross the borders and boundaries of Hong Kong, Korea, and the United States. This is an intimate look at those who dare to explore the geography of hope and love, struggle with dreams of longing and home, and wander in the myths of memory and desire.
Swimming in Hong Kong won the Paterson Fiction Prize, was the sole finalist for the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Asian Books Blog Award, and the Spokane Prize. Individual stories won awards from the South China Morning Post, Nimrod International Journal, and Santa Fe Writer’s Project.
Swimming in Hong Kong is a fine debut. Han captures a host of young people caught in the complexities of global identity with easy authority; the result of rings with authenticity and feeling. -Gish Jen, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interependent Self
Our language when spoken is invisible. When we write, our words are visible, our stories are visible. Stephanie Han works this line between visibility and invisibility, between anonymity and naming for the Korean and Korean American characters in this collection with such subtle force that we find that boundaries and borders were moved when we were silently reading to ourselves. Han’s powerful narrative voice doesn’t tell you what it is you don’t know, especially if you’re the colonizer feeling at home. -Shawn Wong, American Knees and Homebase
Stephanie Han’s Swimming in Hong Kong features precise and subtle meditations on cross-cultural experiences, from Asian Americans in the Midwest and Asia to women negotiating male-dominated worlds. Han gracefully traverses a complicated terrain fraught with the politics of race, sex, class, gender, and culture. Readers will be grateful for having spent time with these quiet and insightful stories. -Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer, Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Lovely, searing emotions course through the stories in Swimming in Hong Kong as Stephanie Han beautifully explores the intersection of longing and ethnicity. her characters achingly search for connections across societal and racial barriers, struggling to discover love across stereotype, desire without fetish. -Trey Ellis, Platitudes and Home Repairs
Swimming in Hong Kong is a winner of the Spokane Prize in fiction. It can be purchased here.