Here are my two collections-in-progress:
Ghost Girl [a memoir in stories]
Ghost Girl is a collection of nonfiction stories narrated by a Chinese-American girl who grew up in a small town in Oregon. The derogatory word for Caucasian in Cantonese is gui, or ghost, but for an American the perception of a ghost is someone that is transparent. The narrator of the stories takes the reader through Oregon, Ohio, China, Guam, and Spain, but most importantly her grandmother’s living room, where she struggles the most to find acceptance
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “Chellis Ying’s ‘Banana and Eggs,’ the latter an account of a Chinese- American’s tough initiation in the land of her ancestors, where her conflicted feeling of belonging fully to neither America nor China boil to the surface. There are many such pieces on the bicultural dilemma, but very few are as seamlessly written and deeply felt as Ying’s [December 8, 2005].
Here is a sample of an essay published in Best Travel Writing 2005, "Spanish Art."
Good and Dutiful [a collection of short-fiction]
Good and Dutiful is a collection of nine short stories featuring Chinese-American characters of various ages, from twenty to sixty, and locations, San Francisco, Saipan, rural Ohio, and Harbin, China. In Chinese, good and dutiful is said gui le, which in a different tone can be said, gui lo, or foreigner. Tones for a native Chinese speaker are effortless to understand, but for an American learning Chinese the subtleties are difficult to differentiate. These stories deal with the various cultural nuances that happen when two backgrounds, American and Chinese, learn to understand one another.
Catherine Brady, author of Curled in the Bed of Love, said: “As a collection, Good and Dutiful does a remarkable job of repositioning the reader on one side or the other of various kind of culture and emotional divides…The cumulative effect is a broader sympathy for each of these characters, wherever they stand, and an illuminating sense of how complicated identity is, both a birthright and a choice.”
Here is a sample of a short-story published in Driftwood Literary Review, "Pretty."
For a full list of other publications.