MOCA TALKS with Daniel Tam-Claiborne – Transplants

About this event

Reserve Tickets Become a Member $15 General Admission | $25 General Admission and Signed Book | $10 Student & Senior | $5 MOCA Members The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to an engaging conversation with writer Daniel Tam-Claiborne on his debut novel Transplants, a lyrical and piercing exploration of migration, belonging, race, love, and the parts of ourselves that can get lost in translation. Set across China and the United States during a single extraordinary year, Transplants follows Lin and Liz, an unlikely pair brought together on a university campus in rural Qixian. Lin, a Chinese student who feels closer to her animals than to her peers, and Liz, a Chinese American English teacher grieving the sudden death of her mother, each navigate hostility, isolation, and the uneasy boundaries of identity. After a betrayal leads to Lin’s expulsion, their paths diverge and unexpectedly intertwine. Lin pursues a degree near Liz’s Ohio hometown, while Liz searches for answers about her parents’ decision to leave China before she was born. As a global catastrophe heightens tensions between China and an increasingly fractured United States, both women must confront the familiar and strange within themselves, and within each other. The conversation will explore the novel’s themes of displacement, intimacy, power, and freedom, as well as the possibilities that emerge when we open ourselves to lives and histories beyond our own. About Daniel Tam-Claiborne Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. His debut novel, Transplants (Simon & Schuster, 2025), was the winner of the Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, HuffPost, Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A 2022…