“Is it really about us?” she asked. “What’s it going to be called?”
“Jane and Fiona,” I said. “Our stories. All the shit we got into—”
“You know what I think?” she said. “Fiona and Jane has a better ring to it.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the following for grants, residencies, and other material support: The Mastheads; MacDowell; Vermont Studio Center; Yefe Nof Residency; Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; UNLV English and the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute; USC English and USC Dornsife. Thank you to the workshop spaces where parts of Fiona and Jane took shape: VONA/Voices; Napa Valley Writers’ workshop; Kundiman; Community of Writers; Bread Loaf; Tin House.
Thank you to my agents, Ayesha Pande and Serene Hakim, for your belief in this project, and your vast patience for my tender neuroses and deranged tweets.
Thank you to my editor, Allison Lorentzen, for asking the right questions of this manuscript. Thank you for your wellspring of intellect, confidence, and enthusiasm, from which I borrowed in order to carry on my work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you also to Camille LeBlanc, and to everyone at Viking.
Thank you to my writing and literature professors, who are all so smart and also very good-looking: Jim Krusoe, Richard Wiley, Doug Unger, Maile Chapman, Jane Hafen, Vincent Perez, Dana Johnson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Aimee Bender, Emily Hodgson Anderson, David Treuer, Danzy Senna, and Percival Everett. Thank you to Laila Lalami for kindness during an especially difficult time. Thank you, Maaza Mengiste, for introducing Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City into my reading life. Thank you, Vanessa Hua. Thank you, brilliant Kundiman faculty （2015, 2017, 2018）： Gina Apostol, Sigrid Nunez, Peter Ho Davies, Lan Samantha Chang, Sabina Murray, Matthew Salesses, Jon Pineda, lê thi diem thúy, and Karen Tei Yamashita.
Thank you, Janalynn Bliss, for your wisdom. Thank you, Dr. Angela Liu, for teaching me how to be a person.
Shout-out to the high school besties forever and the hard-boiled editors and the 199 Orchard crew and the ceramic ladies and the SGV food club. A Charleston Chew for Julian Sambrano Jr., an angel on Earth. I stole these words from Sarah Jung, “men are like sharks, they can smell another dick on you like blood in the water”—thank you, wife. Thank you to Sunyoung Lee and Duncan Williams for letting me write in your house, and for all the food and dharma talks. Emily Yamauchi and Sarah Fuchs are two moons in my sky. Fried chicken and a pitcher of beer at the Prince to Neela Banerjee and Ky-Phong Tran. Many rounds of happy hour cocktails at the Stakeout to Brittany Bronson, Regina Ernst, Jessica Durham, and Sam Samson. Thank you, Cynthia Shaffer, a meteorite gemstone. Thank you, Lilliam Rivera and Kima Jones, for the years of encouragement. Thank you, dear Jamel Brinkley. Thank you to the many writers and colleagues I’ve met through USC, especially Safiya Sinclair, Muriel Leung, Vanessa Villarreal, Amy Silverberg, Lisa Lee, Mike Powers, Mary-Alice Daniel, Nikki Darling, Sam Cohen, and Chris Chien—it’s an honor to pursue a doctorate among your giant, wrinkly brains. Thank you, beloved Vickie Vértiz and Kenji Liu （and Momo）。 Cathy Linh Che, you have my heart. Thank you, sister Monica Sok. Maurice Carlos Ruffin, thank you for bearing witness. Thank you to Angela Flournoy and Ian Blair for the apartment swap, excellent writing vibes, and taking care of my plants. For Xuan Juliana Wang: a mushroom mirror to see your teenage self again. And lastly, I bequeath $300 million each to Jade Chang and Aja Gabel （when my dogecoins hit）。
Thank you to my parents, and to my family （in memory, the present, and future—）。
About the Author
Jean Chen Ho is a doctoral candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Fellow in fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her writing has been published in The Georgia Review, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Guernica, The Rumpus, Apogee, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and others. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Southern California, and lives in Los Angeles.