Debut novel ‘Transplants’ explores identity and belonging while challenging world views

On April 12, Seattle writer Daniel Tam-Claiborne read an excerpt from his debut novel, “Transplants,” to a packed crowd at People’s Waffle, which was open for the reading after hours. Tam-Claiborne was one of the artists performing for the Foray for the Arts event, which closed out the in-person events for the 2025 Get Lit Festival.

He read from a passage in which one of his central characters, Lin, was in English class, just having started school at the local agricultural university in Qixian, China. Travis, her English teacher, used the idiom “cat got your tongue,” and Lin asked for its meaning.

Tam-Claiborne read, “‘It means to be shy, you know, not talkative,’ Travis said. ‘Is that you?’ Some of the other students in class who could understand him snickered. Shy was an understatement. The word he was looking for was jianmin, pariah.

“But Lin sat up straight in her chair. ‘No,’ she said, ‘the cat doesn’t have my tongue.’ She looked around the room, as if surveying a fiefdom. ‘I have his.’”

Transplants, which tells the story of Lin and Liz, a Chinese-American woman who explores China while teaching English. They form an unlikely friendship when their pasts intersect, and then switch places; after an expulsion, Lin moves to Liz’s hometown in Ohio to attend school. From there, the novel is a braided story that deeply explores belonging, identity, family and country.

“I think very much was sort of my intention in creating these two primary female protagonists as sort of vehicles for bringing cultural baggage to play, but then also seeing how so much of their personalities actually go against the countries and traditions that they were more into,” Tam-Claiborne said.

The character’s worldviews are challenged in an accelerated fashion when they’re forced to contend with collective versus individual in a pragmatic way. The book spans a year and takes place during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the first iterations of the book took place during a different time period.

“I was starting to write at the end of 2019 early 2020, and so, of course, we had the inklings of what was happening in China at that time, but no real sense that COVID would become what it did,” Tam-Claiborne said. “The initial conceit of the book was really based in this small town in rural China that’s kind of loosely based on the experience that I had living and working in rural China about 15 years ago. My initial thought was to sort of keep it in that time period, just for ease of kind of cultural reference and an easier way to point to things that I sort of experienced that were sort of true for the time. But once like COVID came into full force, it compelled me to bring the narrative back into the present.”

The pandemic pressurized the cultural differences between collectivist China, where Liz was experiencing lockdown and loss of individual liberties, and individualistic America, where Lin dealt with the rise in racist violence against anyone with Asian ancestry.

“I was in China during the H1N1 pandemic, the swine flu, and so we kind of experienced a very small-scale version of COVID in terms of being locked down on our campus,” Tam-Claiborne said. “And so I knew that that was an element. I just didn’t know quite how prescient, how much the whole world would partake in that exercise, but the question of collective and individual sort of stems from that.”

Like Liz, Tam-Claiborne grew up in the U.S., but lived in China as an adult, in order to better understand his family.

“There was a large part of my life where I was very, really, quite distanced from my Chinese identity,” Tam-Claiborne said. “I grew up raised by my mom as a single mom, and so we celebrated cultural traditions at home. But for her, herself as a first gen, she came over quite young. And so I guess it’s sort of like one and a half gen, but her parents died very young, and so she never really got the opportunity to learn all of the cultural traditions before being thrust into the melting pot we have here.”

In “Transplants,” Tam-Claiborne wrote, “But she realized that if she never set foot in China, there would always be a part of her she’d never fully understand. Phil was increasingly reluctant about her going, but Pearl’s death only bolstered her resolve. Liz felt like she had to hold more tightly to her identity, like she had something to prove.”