Dandelion

• Dandelion is a debut novel that won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, awarded to an unpublished manuscript worthy of publication; the previous winner we published, Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez, has sold over 25,000 copies in Canada.
• Dandelion is the latest fiction title by BIPOC writers; other recent BIPOC authors include Franceca Ekwuyasi, Joshua Whitehead, Larissa Lai, Vivek Shraya, and Kai Cheng Thom.
• Dandelion is a novel about motherhood, family secrets and conflict, migration and statelessness, belonging and identity, and race and mental illness. This book takes place in a small Canadian mining town in the 1980s as well as in present-day Ottawa, Canada and Southeast Asia (Malaysia). Lily is an adult woman whose mother abandoned the family and returned to Asia years ago; Lily blames her father and other family members, who refuse to talk about her mother and their past, preferring to blend into Canadian society. Eventually she goes to Malaysia in search of her mother’s grave and some idea of truth in order to better understand who her mother really was, and in turn, herself. • Jamie has Hakka, Hainanese and Nyonya roots in Southeast Asia. Has strong ties to issues of migration and statelessness; she is a lawyer and law professor, specializing in immigration, refugee and citizenship law. Her podcast, “Migration Conversations,” features experts and migrants who have experienced immigration systems up close.
• One of the book’s interests is the lives of the Chinese (specifically Hakka) diaspora: Chinese by birth but living elsewhere, in this case Southeast Asia and then North America. In Jamie’s own words, she was inspired to write Dandelion “by my father’s previous status as a stateless person for much of his young life before he immigrated to Canada. Specifically, I was motivated to write about the mental weight of being stateless, the worry your children will inherit or be stateless, and how the status of statelessness never leaves you even once you resolve it (if you are lucky).” •In reference to the book’s title, Lily’s father tells her: “Hakka people are like dandelions. Like a dandelion, the Hakka can land anywhere, take root in the poorest soil, flourish and flower.”