Name: M Lin w/ Larry Guo, THE MEMORY MUSEUM
Start: 2026-05-14T19:00:00-07:00
End: 2026-05-14T20:00:00-07:00
Location: The Elliott Bay Book Company

$M Lin w\/ Larry Guo, THE MEMORY MUSEUM$

An expansive debut collection exploring the complex lives of women in China and the Chinese diaspora
About this Event

M Lin launches her debut collection of stories, The Memory Museum, an expansive debut collection exploring the complex lives of women in China and the Chinese diaspora. With daring political and creative commitment, The Memory Museum brims with joy even as Lin exposes the knife’s edge between powerlessness and agency, pain and intimacy, our memories and our futures. She is joined by fellow writer Larry Guo.

Stretching from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s piercing and melodious debut captures the spirit of China’s One-Child Generation as its characters navigate homes and cultures, hopes and contradictions, survival and resistance. These frank, tender, and playful stories offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today.

The collection begins with “Scenes from Childhood,” in which a lonely, elderly woman in a dystopian reality remembers her grandfather’s village. In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” a politically divided couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco. “You Won’t Read This in the News” features four migrant workers during one night of petty theft and connection. In “Tough Egg,” a filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood. Other stories portray a photographer reuniting with her first love in Beijing; the historic White Paper protests that ended the zero-COVID policy; and generations into the future, a newly instated Memory Museum where two sensory architects share their vision for a utopian world.

M Lin is a Chinese writer and translator living in the US. Born and raised in Beijing, she writes in English as her second language. Her first book, The Memory Museum, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in April 2026, including stories that appeared in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023. Her nonfiction and translations can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.

Larry Guo is a Seattle-based writer. He received his MFA from Brooklyn College and has lived in New York, Boston, and briefly in Nanjing and Taipei.