Bio

In Puerto Rico, the kids at El Colegio Sagrado called me “La Chinita” because my birth name (“Xiao Ma”) was impossible to pronounce. My father, fresh out of China’s Cultural Revolution, moved there thinking that Puerto Rico was the 51st state (it said “U.S. territory” on the atlas!), to acquire a magical string of initials behind his last name—a configuration of the alphabet that he hoped would be powerful enough to make us worthy of being American. Unbeknownst to us, a Ph.D. from the Caribbean was useless in America, especially when accompanied by a Chinese accent. Difference, (studies show) can be threatening, because they violate expectancy. 

These days, I have a degree in Spanish and am a psychologist by day to solve precisely this kind of childhood mystery. I received my Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and completed two postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University before my current position as an associate professor at San Jose State University. My empirical studies on culture, social perception and relationships have also been widely covered in GQ (Australia), Esquire (Middle East), Boston Globe, Vice News, Elle Magazine (UK), the Atlantic, Yahoo News, MSN News, Fox News, New York Post, and Daily Mail. My academic text, Cultural Psychology: Cross- and Multicultural Perspectives, has been adopted in classes at college campuses across the U.S. and overseas. 

These badges notwithstanding, I consider my stories my greatest work. Across my two completed novels and short story collection, I break and expand the literary categories we think we know, including newer labels like “immigrant voices” or “writers of color” and age-old ones like “love story.” As a first-generation Chinese-American with a bad habit of moving every handful of years, I’ve been called “a woman without a country,” but that just means I’m most at home when navigating the borders between worlds.