Projects

The Agony of the Leaves

(historical fiction) A novel-in-stories telling the story of tea—from its mythic origins in ancient China to a contemporary queer teahouse.

On an Indian tea plantation, a memsahib and her lady’s maid clash when a deadly epidemic and a life-threatening secret upend their lives. A conscientious governor’s career is destroyed by the Boston Tea Party. A failing merchant’s son attempts to save his family in the days before the Opium War. A thief shanghai’ed onto a tea-carrying clipper ship plies his trade while struggling to survive at sea. A Japanese tea ceremony exposes the hidden fault lines in a samurai family. And, in 1990s Taipei, a queer, revolutionary teahouse is thrown into disarray when one of the owners falls in love with an outsider.  

The Spirit Keepers 

(middle grade fantasy novel) Two cousins begin seeing ghostly visions. Soon they are racing against time to save an ancestor’s lost soul—and fighting hostile spirits to take their rightful place as keepers of Taiwan’s essence.