“My Hungry Ghosts is a stunning collection that weaves together memoir, history, prayer, and intuition. May-lee Chai has a poet’s control of line and image and the essayist’s ability to take complex people and situations and make it possible for readers to comfortably sit in nuance. A lovely, thoughtful book!”
–Megan Giddings, author of Black Arts: Stories and Lakewood, a double NAACP
Image Award finalist.
“May-lee Chai’s My Hungry Ghosts: Essays & Incantations is a searching meditation on life, identity, place, and belonging. Her story, a unique yet universal one, moves through geographic displacement, family trauma, war, and the ambient racism that insinuates itself into the lives and psyches of Asian and Asian American neighbors, co-workers, and friends. And still, Chai writes a life once relegated to the margins into the center of self-hood, repair, and restoration — for herself and her family. As Chai pieces together the traumas of both sides of her family, she moves toward self-understanding and full embodiment, finding her way to the only home that is real and true and safe: the one that lives inside of us.”
–Deborah Douglas, author of the Moon U.S.
Civil Rights Trail: A Traveler’s Guide to the People, Places, and Events That Made the Movement and founding co-editor-in-chief of The Emancipator.
“My Hungry Ghosts is an insightful, compelling collection of essays that demonstrate how histories driven by war and geopolitical conflict are passed down across generations and borders, how prejudicial traumas evolve across limbs of family trees, the powerful fragmented toll of memory, and the need to define one’s own identity as a critical means towards survival.”
—José Vadi, award-winning essayist, poet, playwright and film producer, and author of Inter State: Essays from California and Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens.
“May-lee Chai is a vital voice, telling authentic Asian American stories with complexity and heart.”
–Curtis Chin, author of the national bestseller Everything I Learned, I Learned
in a Chinese Restaurant, a Stonewall Honor Book.
