Kirstin Chen Books in Order

Kirstin Chen was born and raised in Singapore. At fifteen, she moved to the United States for boarding school, then stayed on for college, work, and graduate school.

She studied at Stanford University and later earned an MFA from Emerson College. Her fiction often follows people caught between places, expectations, and versions of the life they thought they wanted.

Writing arrived through a lucky accident. As a Stanford sophomore, Chen walked into a crowded course expecting to study short stories, only to learn it was a workshop on writing them. The class was full, so she volunteered to submit the first story in exchange for a place.

That was the beginning.

Her debut, Soy Sauce for Beginners, brings Gretchen Lin back from San Francisco to Singapore after her marriage falters. She finds a family business in trouble, a mother who needs help, and plenty of old questions about duty, ambition, and where home really is. It is a family story with food, work, romance, and the everyday mess of trying to choose a future.

In Bury What We Cannot Take, Chen shifts to 1950s Maoist China. A family on Drum Wave Islet faces an impossible escape plan, one that forces them to weigh safety against separation. The novel stays close to the private costs of political fear and the way one decision can reshape a whole household.

Then came Counterfeit, a quicker, sharper crime novel about former college roommates Ava Wong and Winnie Fang, who get pulled into a luxury handbag scam. Beneath the fraud and fashion, Chen looks at money, motherhood, immigration, race, and the pressure to look as if everything is going fine.

Her books may move from Singapore to China to California, but they return to people navigating family ties, social class, cultural expectations, and the gap between appearances and reality. She has received fellowships and support from several writing programs and arts organizations, and she has taught creative writing in San Francisco.

Routine matters to Chen. A longtime Ashtanga yoga practitioner, she has connected the discipline of daily practice with sitting down to meet a writing goal, whether inspiration shows up early or not.