The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to an engaging conversation with writer Daniel Tam-Claiborne on his debut novel Transplants, a lyrical and piercing exploration of migration, belonging, race, love, and the parts of ourselves that can get lost in translation.
Set across China and the United States during a single extraordinary year, Transplants follows Lin and Liz, an unlikely pair brought together on a university campus in rural Qixian. Lin, a Chinese student who feels closer to her animals than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American English teacher grieving the sudden death of her mother, each navigate hostility, isolation, and the uneasy boundaries of identity. After a betrayal leads to Lin’s expulsion, their paths diverge and unexpectedly intertwine. Lin pursues a degree near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers about her parents’ decision to leave China before she was born. As a global catastrophe heightens tensions between China and an increasingly fractured United States, both women must confront the familiar and strange within themselves, and within each other.
The conversation will explore the novel’s themes of displacement, intimacy, power, and freedom, as well as the possibilities that emerge when we open ourselves to lives and histories beyond our own.
About Daniel Tam-Claiborne
Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. His debut novel, Transplants (Simon & Schuster, 2025), was the winner of the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, HuffPost, Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received awards and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Poets & Writers, Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
About Transplants
A harrowing and poignant novel following two young women in pursuit of kinship and self-discovery who yearn to survive in a world that doesn’t know where either of them belong.
On a university campus in rural Qixian, Lin and Liz make an improbable pair: Lin, a Chinese student closer to her menagerie of pets than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American teacher grieving her mother’s sudden death. They’re each met with hostility—Lin by her classmates, who mock her for dating a white foreigner; Liz by her fellow English teachers, who exploit their privilege—and forge an unlikely friendship.
After a startling betrayal that results in Lin’s expulsion, they swap places. Lin becomes convinced to pursue her degree at a community college near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers as to what drove her parents to leave China before she was born. But when a global catastrophe deepens the fissures between modern-day China and an increasingly fractured United States, Lin and Liz—far from home and estranged from themselves—are forced to confront both the familiar and the strange in each other.
Unspooling over the course of a single extraordinary year in our not-yet-distant past and in small towns from Dandong to Deadwood, Transplants is a piercing story of migration, belonging, and the parts of ourselves that get lost in translation. Alternating between Liz and Lin’s perspectives, it is a lyrical and moving exploration of race, love, power, and freedom that illuminates the limits and possibilities of what can happen when we open ourselves to the unknown and reveals how even our fiercest differences may bring us closer than we might ever imagine.
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