Vivian Chin, as she signs herself to apparently her first published story, "*true confessions*", in 2003 in the Boston Review, as perhaps the first of a series of stories chosen for the magazine by Junot Diaz. This being some years before Diaz was called to the carpet for sexually harassing various women writers; with luck, Chin didn't have to put up with this.
Chin's story deals with her character's attempts to find good and lasting romantic and sexual relations as the latter has just returned from some academic research abroad, and how things tended to not go so well...the story is humorous, if also a bit wistful, and shot through with pop-culture references that fit my generation pretty well, ranging from citations of the Velvet Underground's songs through others of US tv series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and the 1995 Hong Kong film Fallen Angels, a major international hit. The story can be read at the link above, or here.
Cutting a bit closer to the bone is a short essay by Chin, dealing with the experiences of women on both the Japanese and Chinese sides of her family, "Release your emotions", published in 2017 as part of the Mother of All Stories project of Asian Women United, and can be read here.
More on her personal life and times has been published in the academic press, though it seems currently locked up here...I will look into it more in the near future: "Gestures of Noncompliance: Resisting, Inventing, and Enduring in Citizen 13660", Vivian Fumiko Chin, Pages 21-42 | Published online: 08 Feb 2019.
She reminds me of not a few of my friends in high school and university, who have been to one degree or another peers of hers in years since
For more (and prompter!) of today's short stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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