LOCAL>> Race in America 2023: Oindrila Mukherjee | May-lee Chai

Race in America 2023: Our Stories. Our Voices. Now More than Ever!  

Online author event
* Thursday, February 16, 5:30 pm

In honor of Black History Month and recognizing the importance of uplifting diverse voices and stories now and throughout the year, we are presenting our Annual Race in America event. We will host a mini series of live-online discussions covering a range of provacative issues and exploring possible solutions featuring authors and agents of change, with particular experiences and expertise. Whether you are part of these communities or an ally, we invite you to listen, participate and be a part of the necessary change.

Additionally, we have other special presentations that are part of our Conversations with Authors program as tribute to Black History Month. This includes author and Civil Rights leader, Ben Jealous; Lesley Brown, the author of a new and radical memoir, Blackgirl from Mars, and much more. Check the Book Passage calendar for event dates, times and details.

After living in the US for years, Maneka Roy returns home to India to mourn the loss of her mother and finds herself in a new world. The booming city of Hrishipur where her father now lives is nothing like the part of the country where she grew up, and the more she sees of this new, sparkling city, the more she learns that nothing — and no one — here is as it appears. Ultimately, it will take an unexpected tragic event for Maneka and those around her to finally understand just how fragile life is in this city built on aspirations.

Written from the perspectives of ten different characters, The Dream Builders, Oindrila Mukherjee’s incisive debut novel, explores class divisions, gender roles, and stories of survival within a society that is constantly changing and becoming increasingly Americanized. It’s a story about India today, and people impacted by globalization everywhere: a tale of ambition, longing, and bitter loss that asks what it really costs to try and build a dream.

Oindrila Mukherjee grew up in India, where she worked as a journalist for the country’s oldest English language newspaper The Statesman. She has attended university on three continents and now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University. Her work  has appeared in Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Oxford Anthology of Bengali Literature, The Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Nehru Chevening Centenary Scholarship from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, the Diana P Hobby Prize from Inprint Houston, and a fellowship from the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts. The Dream Builders is her debut novel.

Tomorrow in Shanghai is a short story collection exploring cultural complexities in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and the world at large.  In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai’s latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality.

These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny. Chai’s stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.

May-lee Chai is a writer and educator. May-lee is the recipient of mumerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; 2014 APALA (Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association) Literary Award. She is the author of eleven books, including three novels, My Lucky Face, Dragon Chica, and Tiger Girl; the novella, Training Days; two works of memoir, The Girl from Purple Mountain (co-authored with her father) and the American Book Award–winning short story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants.