Vanessa Hua, award-winning, best-selling author and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. For over two decades, she has been researching and writing about Asia and the diaspora. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Newsweek, among others. Her books, which integrate many of the themes she covers, are critically-acclaimed. A River of Stars was named to the Washington Post and NPR’s Best Books, and was called a "marvel" by O, The Oprah Magazine, and "delightful" by The Economist. Deceit and Other Possibilities, named a New York Times Editors' Choice, received an Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature and was a finalist for a California Book Award, and a New American Voices Award.
Vanessa Hua's forthcoming book, Forbidden City, has already been hailed “magnificent” by Publisher’s Weekly, and is getting rave reviews. I've pasted materials below Hua's new book, as well as some of the articles she's written, establishing her as a voice for the Asian American community.
A Ballantine Hardcover & eBook | On Sale April 19, 2022
“Hua’s provocative latest follows a bold and shrewd woman as she navigates China’s political scene amid the Cultural Revolution. . . . Hua masterly presents Mei’s attempts to leave the Lake Palaces with their ‘power, secrecy, and isolation’ behind as she processes her trauma. This finds a brilliant new perspective on familiar material via its story of a young woman’s brush with power. It’s magnificent.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Vanessa Hua has written a grand, cinematic, and captivating novel. With robust and compassionate imagination, Hua brings to life a heroine who has been relegated to the dustbins of history.”
—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings
“In this intriguing and suspenseful story, Hua tells of a girl who becomes a lover and worshipper of Chairman Mao, plotting revolution after revolution. How to negotiate the maze of the Forbidden City? How to escape?”—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior
“Forbidden City is a wonderful novel, immersive and fascinating. Vanessa Hua writes with an audacious mix of intimacy and narrative sweep about one of the most enigmatic figures and most misunderstood moments in history.”—Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
“Vanessa Hua’s captivating second novel is an act of resistance and reclamation. Forbidden City explores questions of power, ambition, and visibility through a lens that is both clear-eyed and compassionate.”
—Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists
“Arresting, beautiful, and epic, Forbidden City left me breathless by the last page. Hua’s writing is propulsive and packed with rich historical details and exquisitely crafted characters. Mei’s story will stay with you long after reading.”—Lara Prescott, author of The Secrets We Kept
“Gripping and vital, Forbidden City charts the sensual, intellectual, and moral awakening of a young woman who forges her own identity from beneath the shadow of Mao Zedong.”
—C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold
ABOUT THE BOOK
On the eve of China’s Cultural Revolution and her sixteenth birthday, Mei dreams of becoming a model revolutionary. When the Communist Party recruits girls for a mysterious duty in the capital, she seizes the opportunity to escape her impoverished village. It is only when Mei arrives at the Chairman’s opulent residence—a forbidden city unto itself—that she learns that the girls’ job is to dance with the Party elites. Ambitious and whip-smart, Mei beelines toward the Chairman.
Mei gradually separates herself from the other recruits to become the Chairman’s confidante—and paramour. While he fends off political rivals, Mei faces down schemers from the dance troupe who will stop at nothing to take her place and the Chairman’s imperious wife, who has secret plans of her own.
When the Chairman finally gives Mei a political mission, she seizes it with fervor, but the brutality of this latest stage of the revolution makes her begin to doubt all the certainties she has held so dear.
FORBIDDEN CITY (Ballantine; On sale 4/19) is an epic yet intimate portrayal of one of the world’s most powerful and least understood leaders during this extraordinarily turbulent period in modern Chinese history. Mei’s harrowing journey toward truth and disillusionment raises questions about power, manipulation, and belief, as seen through the eyes of a passionate teenage girl.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the novel A River of Stars and a story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, among others. She has filed stories from China, Burma, South Korea, and elsewhere, and her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She has taught most recently at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.
