Melissa Fu, Tsering Yangzom Lama & Shruti Swamy: A Conversation

Tsering Yangzom Lama was born and raised in Nepal to exiled Tibetan parents. She has since lived in Vancouver, Toronto, and New York City. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, Grain, Kenyon Review, Vela, LaLit, and Himal Southasian, as well as several anthologies, including Old Demons New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet and House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal. She is also a co-founder of Lhakar Diaries, a leading English-language blog among Tibetan youth in exile. In We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies (Bloomsbury Publishing), a novel spanning 50 years and three generations, the plight of two Tibetan sisters unfolds. In the wake of China’s invasion of Tibet, Lhamo and her younger sister, Tenkyi, arrive at a refugee camp in Nepal. They have made it across the Himalayas, but their parents have not. Decades later, Lhamo subsists by selling trinkets to tourists near Kathmandu; Tenkyi, living in Toronto, cleans hotel rooms, and Lhamo’s daughter, Dolma, an aspiring Tibetan scholar studying in Canada, lives with her aunt. This is a novel about their life in exile, stories of survival, and desperate holding on to culture and family.

Melissa Fu grew up in Northern New Mexico and has lived in Texas, Colorado, New York, Ohio, and Washington. She now lives near Cambridge, England, with her husband and children. With academic backgrounds in physics and English, Fu has worked in education as a teacher, curriculum developer, and consultant. Peach Blossom Spring (Little, Brown and Company) is her first novel. It is 1938 in China, and Meilin is a young wife with a bright future. But as the Japanese army approaches, Meilin and her 4-year-old son, Renshu, flee their home. Relying on their wits and a beautifully illustrated hand scroll filled with ancient fables for solace and wisdom, they travel through a ravaged country, seeking refuge. Years later, Renshu has settled in America as Henry Dao. His daughter is desperate to understand her heritage, but he refuses to talk about his childhood. He doesn’t want the weight of history dragging his family down. But how can Lily learn who she is if she can never know her family’s story? Peach Blossom Spring offers a look at the history of modern China, told through the story of one family. It’s about the power of our past and finally being home.

Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body. Her work has been published by The Paris Review and McSweeney’s, and anthologized in O. Henry Prize Stories. Her debut novel, The Archer (Algonquin Books), is a bold portrait of a singular woman coming of age as an artist, navigating desire, duty, and the limits of the body. It is also an electrifying and immersive story about the transformative power of art and the possibilities that love can open when we’re ready. Vidya’s childhood is marked by the shattering absence and bewildering reappearance of her mother and baby brother at the family home. Restless, observant, and longing for connection with her brilliant and increasingly troubled mother, Vidya one day peeks into a classroom where girls are learning kathak. This dazzling, centuries-old dance form requires the utmost discipline and focus. Soon, pursuing artistic transcendence through kathak becomes the organizing principle of her life. And as an uncertain future looms, she must ultimately confront the tensions between romantic love, her art, and the legacy of her own imperfect mother. BookPage noted that it “blends the corporeal and the spiritual in a story about what it means to be a woman and an artist. Swamy’s writing is transportive, precise and almost hypnotic. [Her] perceptive and observant eye misses nothing.”