Chuang Hua

When it was first published in America in 1968, Chuang Hua’s evocative novel Crossings was completely unheralded and quickly went out of print. Years later it would be widely recognized as the first modernist novel to address the Asian-American experience, its deeply imagistic prose–marked by spatial and temporal leaps, an unconventional syntax, and unanticipated shifts in plot–as haunting as the writing of Jane Bowles. At the center of Crossings is Fourth Jane, the fourth of seven children whose recollections of an oppressive yet loving father, Dyadya, are collaged with her constant migrations between four continents.…