The increasing number of memoirs and novels set in China over the past couple of decades fall into two broad buckets. A handful of Americans taught English in China and returned to write memoirs around the same time as Chinese immigrants to the US and UK began to find success as fiction writers, both in English and in translation. Daniel Tam-Claiborne’s debut novel, Transplants, combines these two viewpoints: a Chinese-American woman named Liz moves to a small town in Shanxi province to teach English and befriends a local university student named Lin.

Tam-Claiborne’s elegant and lyrical writing is in evidence throughout, as here where,  as the book begins, Lin finds joy in rural Shanxi before beginning university.

Animals were her first love. Guinea pigs, prairie mice, salamanders with bright pink spots. Garden snakes she could curl in the palm of her hand like yarn. Even before Lin was old enough to talk, she was fascinated by how they felt. The sticky webbed feet of a salamander like cupping a sweet rice cake between her fingers. A snake’s lacquered skin: cold cucumber before being minced into vinegar salad.

A bright girl but friendless, she prefers to collect small animals as pets and spend time with them. Her university entrance exam scores open the door to a prestigious university but instead prefers to stay close to home so she can take her gerbils and snakes with her. She fears they won’t survive a long journey. Before she leaves for her agricultural university, also in Shanxi, she asks her mother for a cat. Reluctant at first, her mother agrees only if Lin promises to make a friend at university. Lin ends up making two friends—both American—who will cause her more problems than her mother could ever imagine.

Travis is an American teacher at Lin’s university who, Lin notices, sometimes looks lonely. Appearances and reality intersect and Lin figures she may as well pursue Travis as long as the other students already believe they are dating. Lin’s other American friend is Liz, another teacher at the university—her parents had immigrated to the US from Fujian province. Liz doesn’t like the way Travis treats Lin—he barely acknowledges her in public—and convinces her to break it off. Liz is surprised when it happens.

She couldn’t believe Lin had actually gone through with it. And yet, at the same time, Liz had coached her. Standing out in the middle of the big track, they role-played both parts, like it was an English skit Lin was practicing for class. It was necessary, Liz knew, for Lin to get the intonation right, the way the words were meant to sound, if she was really going to make him suffer.

From there, Lin’s life on campus spirals downward. Travis fails her even though she’s by far the most proficient student in his English class. When Liz learns of this, she blurts out to an administrator that Travis must have failed Lin in revenge. In an all-too-familiar story, the administration expels Lin from the university.

Liz connects with her brother Phil back in Cleveland and arranges for Lin to study at an Ohio community college. Lin has little option but to agree; once there, she feels lonely and out of place.

At night, with the blinds drawn and the low hum of street traffic outside, Lin messaged Liz. She wrote to her often, hoping to hear some word from her, but Liz rarely responded. Lin had gotten used to texting her every day when they were on campus, back when there was hardly anything of intrigue to report. But now that she was in America—where the eddy of daily changes made her head spin—communication trickled to a crawl. She had barely heard at all from Liz since she landed at Phil’s doorstep. In bed, her mind wandered, searching for what it was she’d done wrong.

The pandemic soon breaks out and Liz and Lin are stranded apart, never knowing when they will be able to return home again.

Refreshing with his complex and balanced characters, Transplants is notable for its polished prose. Tam-Claiborne crafts every scene with care, from the first paragraph to the last.

Liz wrapped her feet under the thick sheets and turned off the light. A gust of wind had blown the latch on her window open, and she breathed in the smell of date trees and salt in the vinegar tannins. She heard the crickets and the tree frogs croaking in the distance, the sound of their noises communicated across the dark sky, as they slowly lulled her to sleep.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.