Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Chinese American writer. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Apogee, Ninth Letter, Passages North, The Rumpus, The Cut, Catapult, on HuffPost, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming and has received support from Kundiman, Tin House, and VONA/Voices. She was born in Changchun, China, and grew up in Austin, Texas, where she currently lives. Set against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Zhang’s debut book Four Treasures of the Sky: A Novel (Flatiron Books) follows the story of Daiyu. She never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named – revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, she must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she will reinvent herself to survive. She tries to outrun the tragedy that chases her, and we follow her from a calligraphy school and a San Francisco brothel to a shop in the Idaho mountains. As anti-Chinese sentiment sweeps across the country in a wave of unimaginable violence, Daiyu must draw on who she has been to claim her name and story.
