Isa, on her part, felt that the refusal of food was really to make life behind bars more interesting. They said she was staging a hunger strike. Her body, too, lost its shape, pooling downward, lowering her center of gravity, rooting her toward dirt and dust. The days lost their shape, shedding the definition of hours and minutes. She did feel secure, as if nothing would ever happen to her again, until death. It was the third week into her detention without trial. The sun was her way of telling time and estimating the next delivery of food. Her neck strained to bring her vision to the requisite level such that she could observe the movement of sun against her prison walls. Starvation impaled her through the stomach, keeping her down on the thin mattress, resisting the momentum of her feebly raised head.

She now lives in New York, working as a software engineer by day and a writer by night. YZ Chin was born and raised in Taiping, Malaysia. Against a backdrop of globalization, individuals buck at what seems inevitable-seeking to stake out space for the inner motivations that shift, but still persist, in the face of changing and challenging circumstances. Winner of the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize, YZ Chin’s debut reexamines the relationship between the global and the intimate. Central to the book is Isabella Sin, a small-town girl-and frustrated writer-transformed into a prisoner of conscience in Malaysia’s most notorious detention camp. In these stories, characters navigate fate via deft sleights of hand: A grandfather gambles on the monsoon rains a consort finds herself a new assignment a religious man struggles to keep his demons at bay. Though I Get Home is an intimate and complex look into Malaysian culture and politics, and a reminder of the importance of art in the struggle for social justice.” -Ana Castillo, author of So Far from God and prize judge “A welcome read in American contemporary literature.

Though I Get Home by YZ Chin