Photo Credit: Julian Sambrano Jr.
Jean chen ho
Author of
Fiona and Jane (Viking Books, 2022)
Jean Chen Ho is a writer in Los Angeles. She was born in Taiwan and grew up in Southern California. Jean is the author of Fiona and Jane and an untitled novel, both forthcoming from Viking. She's a doctoral candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Fellow in fiction. Her writing has been published in New York Times Magazine, The Cut, Electric Literature, Los Angeles Times, Georgia Review, Harper's Bazaar, Guernica, The Rumpus, and others. Jean has received scholarships from Kundiman, the Tin House Workshop, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Bread Loaf.
She is the 2023 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Scripps College and a doctoral candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at USC. She has been awarded residencies to the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and the Mastheads. She is a 2019-20 W.M. Keck and George & Arlene Cheng Research Fellow at the Huntington Library, where she is working on an archival project on gender and racial violence in 19th-century Los Angeles Chinatown. Jean is a board member at Kaya Press, an independent publisher of experimental writing from the Asian Pacific Islander diaspora.
Books BY jean chen ho
Fiona and Jane (Viking Books, 2022)
A Time, NPR, Vogue, Oprah Daily, and Vulture Best Book of the Year
A witty, warm, and irreverent book that traces the lives of two young Taiwanese American women as they navigate friendship, sexuality, identity, and heartbreak over two decades.
Best friends since second grade, Fiona Lin and Jane Shen explore the lonely highways and seedy bars of Los Angeles together through their teenage years, surviving unfulfilling romantic encounters, and carrying the scars of their families' tumultuous pasts with them. Fiona was always destined to leave, her effortless beauty burnished by fierce ambition—qualities that Jane admired and feared in equal measure. When Fiona moves to New York and cares for a sick friend through a breakup with an opportunistic boyfriend, Jane remains in California and grieves her estranged father's sudden death, in the process alienating an overzealous girlfriend. Strained by distance and unintended betrayals, the women float in and out of each other's lives, their friendship both a beacon of home and a reminder of all they've lost.
In ten finely drawn stories, Jean Chen Ho's debut collection peels back the layers of female friendship—the intensity, resentment, and boundless love—to probe the beating hearts of young women coming to terms with themselves, and each other, in light of the insecurities and shame that holds them back.
Spanning countries and selves, Fiona and Jane is an intimate portrait of a friendship, a deep dive into the universal perplexities of being young and alive, and a bracingly honest account of two Asian women who dare to stake a claim on joy in a changing, contemporary America.
Praise
“With Fiona and Jane, Jean Chen Ho announces herself as a bold and provocative new talent to watch out for. In this sexy and stylish set of stories about friendship, love, loyalty and betrayal, she fearlessly delves into the intimacies between women and delivers a knockout of a book.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen
“Unsentimental, subtly subversive, and always surprising, Jean Chen Ho’s beautiful debut glides me into revelations about the ambiguities of friendship, queer sexuality, and love. . . . I love this book.” —Cathy Park Hong
“Circles sexuality, money and religion with grace. . . .intimate, cinematic.”— New York Times
“Exemplifying the realities of messy millennial womanhood. . . .the beautiful tangle of two lives in the midst of being lived.”—Washington Post
“Jean Chen Ho’s debut collection . . . evokes a distinctive multi-ethnic Asian American experience coming of age in Los Angeles in the late 20th century: R&B mixtapes, Cool Water cologne, red faces drunk on soju. . . . Through shifting perspectives and evocative milieus (from night markets to seedy Korean bars and exclusive clubs), the assemblage comes as close to a primer on modern L.A. Asian American rites of passage as anything in recent memory.”—Lisa Wong Macabasco, Vogue