UC Santa Cruz

Glint of Sport is deeply indebted to my family’s history of living undocumented in the United States—they’ve taught me to look to the page as a site of permanence when our dreams and labors have been eclipsed by a state of eternal transit. The novel follows the life of a woman named Laiyla as her family immigrates from China to the United States, spanning episodes of her life from birth to death. The stories mirror diasporic movement, following her from a fishing village in Anhui to a crowded warehouse party in New York, tracing transpacific geographies across bodies and borders. The novel complicates the traditional perception of diaspora as a loss of a prior fullness. If home is predicated on dislocation, these stories ask where she should go next with our irrevocability—towards dreams, intimacies, and sites of resistance in the present tense.