Fiona and Jane

August 1, 2021

Linked stories from doctoral writing candidate Ho, who has already published in venues like Guernica and the Rumpus, tell the story of close friends Fiona Lin and Jane Shen. The two take risks together as teenagers in the scrappier reaches of Los Angeles, seeking love and escape from family chaos. Fiona soon moves to New York to care for a sick friend, Jane stays home to cope with her estranged father's unexpected death, and together they try to maintain their friendship despite past pain and future uncertainty.

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October 11, 2021
In Ho’s intimate debut collection, two childhood friends, Fiona and Jane, grow up, grow apart, and then back together. The first story, “The Night Market,” begins with 18-year-old Jane’s visit to her father in Taiwan. On her last night there, her father reveals he’s in love with his male friend Lee and that he will not be returning to Jane and her mother in Los Angeles. Reeling after this revelation, Jane reflects on her parents’ relationship and her own budding romantic feelings toward her female piano teacher. From there, the stories follow more or less chronologically, with “Go Slow,” flashing back to an eventful night drinking soju at a strip mall Korean bar when Fiona and Jane are 16, then forward to Fiona’s ambitious move to New York with her boyfriend, Jasper, after college in “The Inheritance,” while Jane stays in California. “Cold Turkey” finds Jane grieving over her father and breaking up with her girlfriend. In later stories, Fiona leaves both law school and a cheating Jasper, and the old friends reconnect. Ho excels at creating characters whose struggles feel deeply human. This packs in plenty of insights about love and friendship. Agent: Ayesha Pande and Serene Hakim, Ayesha Pande Literary.

November 1, 2021
Who knows you better: you or your best friend? Close friends Fiona and Jane--or Jane and Fiona--are constant presences in each other's lives, sometimes from afar, sometimes in each other's faces. From childhood through early adulthood, the two Taiwanese American young women scramble though the obstacle courses of their lives, each negotiating complicated family circumstances and carrying the weight of secrets kept from them and secrets they keep from others. Both spend their childhood in southern California--Fiona after emigrating from Taiwan--in households shadowed by the specter of a father missing in one way or another. Adolescence and young adulthood propel the girls onto separate courses of education, employment, finances, and sexuality, but they never leave each other's emotional orbit entirely. Presented in a series of short stories told from alternating perspectives, Fiona's and Jane's stories (story, really) recount the realities of a girlhood spent in league with someone else who "gets" you (for the most part). The duo's coming-of-age saga is shot through with moments of clarity and understanding: realizing you are competitive with your best friend, realizing your mother knows (and knew) things, realizing you are not the only one with secrets. (Some realizations are fully articulated, some left for the reader to work out, a stylistic choice that intrudes at times.) Ho's adept captures of childhood confusion, teenage angst, and adult malaise lend the stories a universality that is not undermined by her equally precise dissections of racial and sexual issues facing Fiona and Jane. The misogynistic dangers facing the girls as they stretch their high school wings in the gorgeous and nerve-wracking story "Go Slow" echo throughout the work as a whole, with a particularly resounding tone in the devastating precis, "Korean Boys I've Loved." Readers will wish for a Fiona or Jane in their own lives.

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November 1, 2021
Fiona and Jane are two Taiwanese American girls from broken immigrant families trying to find their place in the world. Since second grade, they supported each other through confusion, teenage angst, identity crises, and heartbreak. Fiona is confident, beautiful, and ambitious, but the debilitating loneliness she feels in her family keeps her on the run. After college, she moves to New York with her college sweetheart and ends up taking care of his sick best friend. After Fiona moves away, Jane learns the news of her father's untimely death in Taiwan, and she feels stricken with grief and unbearable guilt that she can't seem to process. Both women search for love and belonging in relationships and other people, trying to fulfill something missing in their lives. But despite the distance and all the people that come and go, their friendship remains unbreakable. In this tender and timeless debut, Chen Ho explores the intimate facets of female friendship, Asian American immigrant experiences in Los Angeles and New York, and the debilitating power of family traumas.

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