"Chuang Hua finished Crossings in 1968 -- a time of rampant social and artistic experimentation. She played with style and language to tell the modernistic story of Chinese becoming Western. A fascinating read." --Maxine Hong Kingston
"Chuang Hua's themes -- crossing cultural barriers, crossing parental and conventional strictures, searching for a center within oneself from the past that is ever present--are not limited to Chinese-Americans: rather, they are universal concerns." --Amy Ling, from the Afterword
When it was first published in America in 1968, Chuang Hua's evocative novel Crossings was completely unheralded and quickly went out of print. Years later it would be widely recognized as the first modernist novel to address the Asian-American experience, its deeply imagistic prose--marked by spatial and temporal leaps, an unconventional syntax, and unanticipated shifts in plot--as haunting as the writing of Jane Bowles
