“I’m fascinated with stories about how people leave the Christian church: their un-testimonies”

In “Sweet Scoundrel,” Tiantian, the mistress, gets pregnant, and Robert decides to introduce his grown daughter to her in a warped effort to keep the family — some version of it — together. Back in the States, meanwhile, Robert’s wife suffers a familiar foreboding. Lan had always credited herself with a sixth sense for disaster. Many women had it. Intuition, they called it in the U.S. Hers was different. Hers was an inheritance from the women in her bloodline who had watched their husbands wracked by opium, their children hunted by the Japanese, their riches burned or pillaged by the Communists and the Kuomingtang. Generations of misfortune had taught her how to sense imminent peril.

This strain of intergenerational trauma will be familiar to readers of part-time Seattleite Tessa Hulls’s brilliant, somehow-still-underrated-despite-winning-the-Pulitzer graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts. But Xin’s investigation of Chinese-American heritage shares more in common with a different Seattle author, Daniel Tam-Claiborne, and his recent novel Transplants. Tam-Claiborne, like Xin, taught English in China during his creative maturation. Poignant notes of cultural dislocation echo across both of their debuts. Xin told me her year in China utterly changed her relationship with the country, “because I actually got to be on my own, versus being shown around by relatives.” 

The keenest identity-based insights arise in a recurring set of characters, the Lius, who we first meet in “The Magnificent Funerals of Auntie Du” and reencounter every couple stories. Mrs. Liu, a somewhat conservative first-generation Chinese immigrant, is struggling to understand her thoroughly Americanized daughter, Michelle. At one point Michelle, after quitting her job at the nice Internet company, decides to spend a year alone in China, escaping her stultifying family. When Mrs. Liu flies over to check on her estranged daughter, she encounters something uncanny: Michelle is acting like an expert on her mother’s home.

Mrs. Liu was content to let Michelle explain China to her, but she was surprised when her daughter turned, eyes bright, and said, “Mom. I love it here.”

“Michelle is very excited to have found her own version of China,” Xin said as we finished our meal. “And she’s not yet curious about what her mom’s version is. She hasn’t quite learned enough to be curious.”

This mother-daughter relationship is frequently lost in translation, most of all when it comes to religious belief — Michelle’s American youth has secularized her. Xin grew up attending a Chinese Christian Evangelical Church, with services in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Michelle’s journey, she said, “is reflective of my journey from high school through college, trying to disentangle myself from the belief and the faith I was taught growing up.”

Xin knows first-hand how difficult it is to step away from religion when it provides such a strong sense of community. “I’m fascinated with stories about how people leave the Christian church: their un-testimonies,” she said. 

Xin’s characters contemplate leaving other things, too: husbands, wives, countries, jobs. But the eschewal of religion is one of her most visited motifs. In the collection’s final story, “Joy Comes in the Morning,” an unemployed art teacher named Laura receives the following guidance from her mother: God’s got a purpose for you, Laura[… ] Don’t you worry. We’re not all meant to be artists, but he’ll use you like he uses all of us. To God be the glory.

Xin told her parents she wanted to be a writer when she was only seven years old. So they were well-prepared when she eventually set off down that path. “But growing up in a Christian family,” she said, “there are definitely moments where it's like, We'll just give it up to the Lord. It’s in God's hands. That part is frustrating. It's a conversation ender, you know?”

A good work of literature should be the exact opposite: a conversation starter. Book of Exemplary Women is just that. The product of a decades-long writing career, Xin’s story collection is a thought-provoking reflection on what it is to grow up. Just don’t expect any raspberries.