Edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and published by the Feminist Press, in collaboration with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Go Home! is an anthology of fiction, memoir, and poetry by Asian diasporic writers, including Alexander Chee, Marilyn Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Chang-Rae Lee, Rajiv Mohabir, and Wendy Xu, who imagine the concept of “home” in all its complexity. Below is the foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. 

When I was seventeen, I could not wait to leave home, even though I was more fortunate than many. My father and mother did nothing wrong in our home, which was in San Jose, California. Our first house was by a downtown freeway entrance ramp, the soaring taillights of the cars visible from my bedroom window. I dreamed of taking off with them. Our second house was in the quiet foothills, where my father still lives, his bedroom furnished with a computer and a photocopier manufactured in the 1980s.

There was no abuse, and there was always food, warmth, light, and religion. There was love, too, the quiet kind that expresses itself not through words and embraces but through acts of sacrifice, through the model of parental lives given to duty: the twelve-to-fourteen-hour days working at a grocery store with hardly a day off, the devotion to the church, the remittances sent home to desperate relatives in a postwar Vietnam—the typical grind of all refugee families.

And yet, despite not needing anything, I wanted more, although exactly what, I did not know. I wanted to leave home because I wanted to find a home of my own creation. My parents’ sacrifice allowed me to yearn for more than they could give, and for more than San Jose or the Vietnamese refugee community there could offer. To my teenage self, it was a bland city of routine desires for suburban homes and expensive goods, not of ideas or “culture.” To me, culture meant the world I read about in books and saw in movies, the charming white fantasies of Paris and New York.

The culture of San Jose that I knew, the Vietnamese one, was neither charming nor fantastic. The Vietnamese community was marked by close bonds of kinship and identity but also by the fallout of war, demonstrated through anger, violence, and bitterness. It was the war that drove my parents to become shopkeepers toiling in their store, where they were shot one Christmas Eve. They were suspicious of their own countrymen and warned me never to open the door to Vietnamese people, for fear of them invading our home (when it happened, when the gun was pointed in all our faces, the hand holding it belonged to a white man). The closeness and the legacy of trauma meant, for me, an atmosphere of suffocation, confined by the walls and boundaries of my parents’ home, of the Vietnamese community, and of San Jose.

I did not know it then, but what I wanted was a home without walls and boundaries. For some, walls and boundaries comfort rather than confine, keeping things out and keeping things in. As a refugee and an alien in the eyes of many Americans, I knew inarticulately that I was an outsider. At my mostly white high school, the handful of us who were Asian gathered in a corner for lunch and called ourselves the “Asian invasion.” Growing up in San Jose, I might have become one of those outsiders and invaders who only wanted to get inside at any cost. But ever since I had seen a sign in a shop window near my parents’ store that read “Another American driven out of business by the Vietnamese,” I knew that the yearning to be inside—to be just another American—might also tempt people toward hatred and fear.

Comfortably ensconced at last within four walls and a mortgage, we may be tempted to close the door behind us and lock it shut. Some former Vietnamese refugees do so today when they say the United States should not take in new refugees from the Middle East. They are wrong, forgetting that once they were the outsiders whom the majority of Americans did not want to take in. They are not special or exceptional, only lucky to be the beneficiaries of American guilt (at having abandoned South Vietnam) and American political calculation (for taking in refugees from a formerly communist country was simply another strategic move of the so-called Cold War). In contrast to those who use homes to shut people out, I believe that we need to keep our doors open. Or knock down the walls altogether.

I found a home in language and storytelling. This home has walls of a kind. One needs to speak and read English to be in my home, which can be unwelcoming to some. But no one is locked out, beginning with me. I found my entryway in school, learning to read, and through librarians at the public library. The library was literally my second home and also the home of the books through which I found freedom and flight from a world that I found confining. Books offered adventure, the promise of new worlds, the sight of further horizons. While the San Jose library mostly offered the canon of colonizers, I nevertheless learned from this literature a love of language and storytelling, a desire for beauty in word and narrative. Through books and stories, the world became my home, a place from which I could never be dispossessed so long as I lived and my mind could roam. For a refugee like me who had lost his country of origin and his mother tongue, a home that could never be lost was a way to always feel safe.

It wasn’t until I went to university that I discovered the powerful traditions of decolonization and minority writing, which emerged in part to contest the widely accepted literary canon. These traditions taught me defiance and the values of justice and solidarity, traditions that have their own beauty. Writers deployed them to stake their claim of being at home in literatures often written in the language of masters and colonizers.

The existence of Go Home! testifies to the power of language as a home open to all, albeit one that we must often fight for. Against the racist demand that we go back to where we came from, we say that we are already at home, not just in the United States, but in English.

While this preoccupation with home is a universal human concern, it becomes particularly dire for those whose identities make them vulnerable to the threat of never belonging. This has certainly been the case for Asian Americans, whose experience with racism in the United States has often times occurred through being painted as the perpetual foreigner, the yellow peril or brown terror, with unbreakable ties to a land of origin or ancestry.

But those who tell us to “go home” are no match for those of us who can write back in the very language used against us. The beauty of a home in language is that it allows us to create a multiplicity of homes. The writers in this anthology talk about home as being found in family, history, food, love, place, body, memory, song, and religion. They describe homes filled with all kinds of emotions, from love to hate and everything in between. Their homes are places of comfort and discomfort, of belonging and alienation, of the beginning of life and its end. But if homes are not always idyllic and are often conflicted, and if in some cases it is impossible to go home because home no longer exists or is not a place one wishes to return to, then living with a degree of homelessness might be a necessity. There can be a danger in being too much at home, too secure, especially for writers. Feeling uncomfortable at times—feeling not at home—keeps us alert, empathetic, aware of how so many others are not at home or not allowed to feel at home.

Reading this collection, I visited all of these writers’ homes and experienced their homelessness filtered through their stories and poems. All of their works were gifts to me, and I thought about how homes can be gifts too. While some gifts are given with the hope of receiving something in return, eventually, other gifts are given without any expectation of reciprocity. Stories exist along that spectrum as well. Sometimes writers write and hope for fame or fortune. Sometimes people create homes and expect to reap a return from those they house, a payment in love or at least obligation. But the best gifts, in my mind, are those that we give selflessly. As a writer, I aspire to be that kind of gift giver, hoping that my stories will affect readers I will never know and never hear from, just as I was affected by writers who never knew their words were a gift to me. As the recipient of generosity, I hope to give generously in turn, as I believe many of the writers in this collection are likewise giving of their words and stories.

As for my first home, I think of how my parents gave me so much and how I did not appreciate their gifts in my youth. If I had, would I have stayed home? If I had stayed home, would I have become a writer? Perhaps not. Probably not. And if so, then it was for the best that I left. In my case, as may be the case for many others, I had to leave home in order to go home. This was a figurative return, for I understood, over time, that the home they provided for me was not literally just a house. Their home was the act of giving itself, which is also to say the act of love. Going home, in my case, was then a matter of learning how not just to receive but to give, certainly to my own family but also to those who may be my readers.

Perhaps the writers in this collection also had to leave home in order to go home. Read them. Their gifts will show you the many shapes home can take, as well as the many ways we can leave and, maybe, return.

Excerpted from the anthology Go Home!, published in March by the Feminist Press in partnership with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

On March 11 the board of directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), led by chair David Haynes, ended its relationship with the organization’s long-time executive director, David Fenza, during a brief meeting in the lobby of the Marriott Tampa Waterside in Tampa, Florida, as writers, editors, and other members of the literary community were checking out of the hotel after a long weekend at the organization’s annual conference and book fair. “I had no warnings,” says Fenza, who was hired in the late eighties as publications editor and later rose to the organization’s top position. “I had no wishes to leave AWP.”

Haynes, who teaches at Southern Methodist University, confirmed the news in an interview on March 15. “After twenty-nine years of service, the board has ended its relationship with Mr. Fenza,” he said. “We wish [him] well.” When asked for details, Haynes said: “We are obligated by law to protect Mr. Fenza’s privacy, meaning that we can’t say anything about our current relationship with him. He is also an employee of UMD, our host institution.”

The office of the dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland in College Park, where AWP had recently relocated after nearly twenty-five years of operation at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, confirmed that Fenza is no longer employed by the university. In a letter dated March 11, Bonnie Thornton Dill, the dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, informed Fenza that the decision had been made to “terminate” his employment prior to the completion of his “probationary period,” a temporary status applied to new hires, including Fenza, following the organization’s recent move. During the probationary period, neither the university nor AWP is required to give Fenza “any reason at any time” for its “rejection of employment.”

“They did not give me reasons,” Fenza says.

“It was a challenging year with the relocation disrupting all AWP business, as I was working with architects, contractors, furniture sales people, many vendors, new university administrators, and a new, terribly complex university administrative system,” Fenza says. “I had to do all this with four vacancies in key staff positions, as some staffers chose not to move with us to Maryland. It was a difficult year. I worked many weekends and many fifty-hour weeks and a few much longer weeks. I did as much as I could as well as I could for the benefit of AWP. I am still stunned.”

So why would AWP, which both Fenza and Haynes say is financially healthy and is coming off another seemingly successful conference and book fair during which thousands of writers, editors, and writing program instructors enjoyed a full schedule of panels, readings, and meetings, part ways with its executive director?

Matt Burriesci, who worked at AWP for twelve years, most recently as the director of development, before leaving the organization in 2011, sent a letter to the board on the morning of March 14, demanding answers. In an e-mail exchange the following day, Burriesci expressed his dismay that AWP had not been more forthcoming in its messaging about the change in leadership. “In mature organizations, the departure of a long-serving chief executive would be handled delicately, and with a considerable amount of foresight, class, and magnanimity. Typically a chief executive who had so demonstrably improved an organization’s fortunes would be publicly celebrated, whatever the proximate cause for termination (unless of course, the cause was criminal in nature, which seems highly unlikely in this case),” he wrote. “There would be nothing personal in it. A board would offer a generous exit package, and the messaging would be carefully and thoughtfully managed.  A glowing, laudatory statement about the executive’s service and accomplishments would be issued. Even if there was some acrimony (and there was always a lot of it at AWP), you do this to avoid the appearance of strife inside the organization, to ensure a smooth transition, to encourage good candidates to apply for the position, and to insulate the organization from criticism, from lawsuits—you do it for all sorts of good reasons. Whatever the short-term cost may be, it’s insignificant compared to the long-term costs of not doing it.”

News of Fenza’s departure broke on March 12, as several literary figures, including Kima Jones, founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts, sent tweets to their followers: “Breaking: After 29 years of service, David Fenza has ended his service as Executive Director of @awpwriter. National search for an Executive Director underway. #AWP18.” Jones says the AWP board reached out to her and other literary figures and partners on the evening of March 11, shortly after the meeting with Fenza, to get the word out.

Official word from AWP came four days later, when a nearly identical message was posted on the organization’s website and tweeted out to its followers, leaving some to wonder whether Fenza had resigned from his post. In an e-mail exchange that same day, Bonnie Culver, director of the MFA program at Wilkes University and vice chair of the AWP board, repeated the statement that “David has ended his tenure.” 

Burriesci, who served as active executive director from 2009 to 2010 while Fenza studied for his masters of public administration degree in management at Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, says he worries that the way Fenza’s departure was handled will harm the organization’s efforts to find a successor. “Any candidate actually qualified to do the job (which is quite difficult—I’ve done it), would certainly see a lot of glaring red flags in the sudden, unexplained departure of the previous executive. I can only speak for myself, but I know I wouldn’t apply for that job given the uncertainty and gossip surrounding this affair. It’s all highly unusual. The board really needs to explain what happened, and, if possible, they need to do some serious damage control…. It’s bizarre to find out, via a tweet, that he no longer works there, and it’s also bizarre that the board has said absolutely nothing about it.”

Haynes says the board is already working, in conjunction with Thornton-Dill and the University of Maryland, to find Fenza’s replacement. “We want to work quickly,” Haynes says. “We have an outstanding staff. I’ve spoken with all of them individually. We want to get someone in place as soon as possible, which will help them feel more secure in what they’re doing on a daily basis. I have complete confidence in our staff to carry on the work of the organization.”

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.

On March 21 a group of former members of the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) circulated a petition “to ensure the future of AWP and to address the recent and sudden dismissal of David Fenza,” the former executive director who was dismissed from his job on March 11. The petition, posted on care2.com, calls on the current board to “develop and issue a statement recognizing Fenza’s service and accomplishments” and to “extend a reasonable severance package” to Fenza that includes “at least six months of pay and benefits.” As of Thursday afternoon, the petition had been signed by more than 165 supporters.

The AWP board, led by chair David Haynes, has declined to comment on the reason for the change in leadership. Fenza says he was given no reason for his dismissal.

Meanwhile, a growing number of writers and members of the literary community are sharing their perspective that Fenza’s response to a variety of issues at AWP over the years, including well-documented dustups and disagreements with those who have criticized the member-based organization, provided enough warning that a change in AWP’s top position was in the offing and that, indeed, the change is not necessarily a bad thing.

“Good, have [AWP] led by someone who is intersectional and will listen to the concerns of communities long ignored,” tweeted Jenn Baker, host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a writer who has contributed to Poets & Writers Magazine, and the editor of Everyday People: The Color of Life—A Short Story Anthology, forthcoming from Atria Books in August.

That AWP has faced controversies in the past will be a surprise to no one, but 2015 was an especially contentious year for the organization. In May of that year, AWP faced criticism when it was revealed that conceptual poet Vanessa Place had a seat on the 2016 conference subcommittee, the group responsible for selecting which panels would be presented at the organization’s annual conference. The Los Angeles–based poet and artistic provocateur had been tweeting the entirety of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, line by line, using a caricature of Hattie McDaniel—who played Mammy in the 1939 film adaptation of the novel—as her profile picture. A Change.org petition, led by writer Timothy Volpert—and subsequently signed by over 2,000 writers—described Place’s project as appropriation that was “at best, startlingly racially insensitive, and, at worst, racist,” and called on AWP to remove her from the committee. AWP eventually removed Place and issued a brief statement that the organization “believes in freedom of expression” and that the removal of Place was due not to her work itself or its larger implications, but rather because of the controversy it was causing within the literary community. “AWP must protect the efficacy of the conference subcommittee’s work,” read the statement. “The group’s work must focus on the adjudication of the 1,800 submitted proposals, not upon the management of a controversy that has stirred strong objections and much ill-will toward AWP and the subcommittee.”

Later in 2015, on August 4, Laura Mullen, director of the MFA program at Louisiana State University (LSU), tweeted a question about the diversity breakdown of panels accepted for the 2016 conference, which eventually led to a petition calling for increased transparency, accessibility, and diversity at AWP. In a blog post, Mullen revealed that Fenza had sent an e-mail to her, dated August 6 and copied to her department chair and her associate chair at LSU, in which Fenza wrote, “We would hope that the director of a member AWP program would support our association rather than cast aspersions upon it via Twitter, as you have done.” Mullen responded a week later with a letter that read, in part: “I thank you for writing: the document provides evidence of the lengths to which the organization is willing to go to silence critique and stave off self-scrutiny.” Three weeks later, Fenza apologized to Mullen. “I understand why you and AWP’s members found this letter to be threatening,” he wrote in a statement published on the organization’s website. “That was not my intention.”

Fenza’s apology came on the heels of an op-ed titled “AWP Is Us,” written by Red Hen Press founder and managing editor Kate Gale in defense of the organization, which appeared on the Huffington Post on August 24, 2015. The article, which contained offensive language surrounding issues of diversity, gender and sexuality, only served to strengthen the controversy, especially after it was later taken down from the site and Fenza offered his support of Gale, who apologized for the piece. In a Publishers Weekly article posted on August 27, Fenza said no one at AWP had asked Gale to apologize for the Huffington Post piece. He also said that “her intentions were good,” and that he appreciated her defense of AWP. “Nobody was standing up for this organization,” he said at the time.

These controversies, now nearly three years old, are still fresh in the minds of those who have taken to social media to voice their opinions about Fenza’s departure.

“After the issues with Vanessa Place, diversity and inclusion, disability access, his letter attacking a professor and member of the org for publicly holding the conference to transparency…it’s well past disingenuous to suggest Fenza’s firing was unexpected,” wrote Alyss Dixson, a visiting scholar-artist in residence at Ohio State University’s department of African American and African Studies, in a comment on Facebook. “To the contrary, it has been agitated for by numerous blocs within the conference for at least 5 years.”

More recently, Baker points out, there have been complaints from the disabled community, “including Karrie Higgins, whose registration fee was not refunded when AWP would not accommodate her for being unable to attend due to various physical conditions,” she says, adding that a number of writers “have spoken out consistently about ableism and lack of acknowledgment of accessibility at the conference and inclusion in the programming.” 

Still, Baker wonders, “Why get rid of Fenza now when he’s been problematic in the past?”

Whatever the reason, the manner in which it was done—with no official explanation, the news distributed via tweet—rubs even Mullen the wrong way. “I’m sorry this wasn’t done earlier,” she says, “but to do it now in the style of Trump rather than Obama makes it hard to feel that this is good news.”

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers, Inc.