The Author: Daniel Tam-Claiborne
The Book: Transplants (Regalo Press, 2025)
The Elevator Pitch: A lyrical exploration of love, power, and freedom through the intertwined lives of two young women who yearn to survive in a world upended.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Daniel Tam-Claiborne: The first inkling for the novel came over fifteen years ago, when I accepted a fellowship to teach English at a university in rural Shanxi Province, China, right after undergrad. As a mixed race Chinese American, I naively thought that the whole experience would be a chance to finally come to terms with my identity. But despite my best efforts at assimilating—marked by my passport and appearance—I remained, simply, a foreigner.
We often frame international education and cross-cultural exchange as a mutually beneficial experience for all parties involved. While I believe that’s generally the case, I also think there are exceptions. For years after, in spite of how undeniably positive the experience was on my own life, I found myself questioning the hierarchies that exist in cross-cultural settings—who gets to belong, who gets left behind, and how even fleeting encounters can alter someone’s trajectory forever. Those ideas are woven throughout Transplants.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Tam-Claiborne: I began writing Transplants in earnest in 2019 during the last semester of my MFA program. I had the truly great fortune of working with Lauren Groff who, when given the option between helping me touch up my existing short stories for my graduate thesis or advising me on a new project nearly entirely from scratch, wisely nudged me toward the latter. I wrote the first half of what became Transplants as my thesis in July 2020, and Lauren (thank my lucky stars) generously agreed to continue to be my accountability partner for the next several months until I had written a complete first draft. I spent all of 2021 revising and rewriting the novel while on a Fulbright in Taiwan and started querying agents in the spring of 2022.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Tam-Claiborne: Yes! My first love was poetry and I moved on to short stories when I felt that the container necessary to hold all the things I wanted to say was becoming too small. Even when I started my MFA program, I had only ever wanted to write short stories and had zero aspirations of writing a novel. If you had told me when I started drafting what eventually became Transplants that I was writing a book, I would have probably run away screaming and never finished it. I’ve thankfully since warmed to the possibility of ever writing a novel again.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Tam-Claiborne: Most writers have told me that they either find more friction during the agent querying process or submissions. I feel grateful that the path to my agent was relatively storybook in its serendipity, but submitting to editors was a totally different animal. It’s a fact I’ve become more comfortable sharing—and wearing as a badge of pride—but Transplants was rejected by over a hundred imprints before finding a yes. It was one of the most trying experiences for me as a writer, but I owe everything to the perseverance of my agent, Chad Luibl, for seeing the potential in my work and Caitlyn Limbaugh at Regalo Press for agreeing to publish it.
Rumpus: Which authors / writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Tam-Claiborne: While there are increasingly more works of fiction that deal with the position of Chinese in America or Americans in China, relatively few delve into the politics and the particularities of Chinese Americans in China. I was informed by many works, but most of all by writers like Xue Xinran, Lisa Ko, Gish Jen, Aube Rey Lescure, Rachel Khong, Ling Ma, and Peter Ho Davies, who write about the Asian diaspora and the universal feelings of loss, displacement, and the search for meaning in foreign places.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Tam-Claiborne: The novel was originally going to be set in the late 2000s, overlapping with my own time living and working in China. There was always going to be a quarantine element, which mirrored my own experience being in China during the H1N1 (swine flu) epidemic. But when the real-world pandemic hit, I decided to shift the timeline into the present. Writing about an unfolding crisis allowed me to explore themes of agency, migration, and power in a way that raised the stakes for my protagonists and kept me guessing what would happen next. It also underscored the underlying tensions at the heart of US / China relations and the persistent precarity of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners in this country.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Tam-Claiborne: I’ve been privileged to have had fiction and essays published in print and online journals, including Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, HuffPost, The Seventh Wave, The Shanghai Literary Review, and The Rumpus (!), as well as the anthology Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears (Simon & Schuster, 2023).
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Tam-Claiborne: There are so many incredible writers in the world whose work never sees the light of day. It’s very rarely the most talented who end up getting published, it’s “who stays at the table longest.” I’ve known many people who’ve had to stop writing because of self-doubt or life demands or the fact that it’s nearly impossible to make a sustainable living in this profession. I feel so fortunate that this little novel will have its own fleeting moment, but I know that it just as easily may never have happened if not for the enormous sacrifice and generosity of so many who have believed in me and my work.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Tam-Claiborne: I wrote this novel for anyone experiencing living in the interstices— the space between cultures, between places, and between identities—that has always been my passion as a writer. The feeling of being caught between worlds is one many know well. For those who straddle identities—whether as immigrants, children of immigrants, expats, refugees or cultural wanderers—there’s a quiet exhaustion in constantly translating yourself–in being asked, “Where are you really from?” Anyone who has ever felt like an outsider or struggled to fully belong will hopefully find a connection with this novel.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Tam-Claiborne: How cathartic it was to kill my darlings! When my editor acquired my novel, she didn’t have much feedback on specific developmental edits, save for the fact that I needed to cut 15% of the words. This, naturally, terrified me, and for weeks I just stared at that line of feedback thinking it would be impossible to achieve. But when it came down to it, I actually reveled in trimming my book down. I kept a spreadsheet with the number of words in each chapter and how many I had cut after each successive draft. By the end, Transplants, which had started at just over 100k words, published at 85k, and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.
Author Photo Credit: George Orozco
