C Pam Zhang on Looking For Home

Photo: Avinash Bhaskaran

“After I gained citizenship, it was just this constant vibrational confusion that I held within me about, what do I claim as my culture? Who do I claim affinity to? How can I ever reconcile these questions?”

C Pam Zhang is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, which won the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature, was nominated for the Booker Prize, and was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. Zhang’s writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree.