Darien Hsu Gee: Writing with honesty 

Award-winning author Darien Hsu Gee read select works last Thursday, Oct. 12, at the UConn Bookstore in Storrs Center, thanks to UConn’s Creative Writing Program. She is now the third recipient of the Mark Twain Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Program, following Alexander Chee in 2021 and Justin Torres in 2019.  

This is a biennial event, where recognized prose authors are brought to UConn to read their work to those in attendance. Later, both undergraduate and graduate students are granted the opportunity to have 45-minute tutorial sessions with said author; Gee held six of these tutorials  last Friday. 

Gee commands a wide audience, having penned five novels published by Penguin Random House, which have been translated into eleven languages. She obtained her undergraduate degree from Rice University and her M.F.A. from Pacific Lutheran University. She is now based in Hawaii where she has received many accolades, including the 2015 Hawaii Book Publishers’ Ka Palapala Poʻokela Award of Excellence. She also holds a position on the Hawaii Island Leadership Council for the Hawaii Community Foundation, according to her website. Point being, she is a trailblazer wherever she goes. 

The director of UConn’s creative writing program Sean Forbes notes how the Writer-in-Residence Program allows for students to interact with “some of today’s most exciting authors,” and Gee certainly lives up to that hype. The tenacity of her readings is exemplified no better than in “Platitudes,” an essay of flash nonfiction included in the anthology “Fast Fallen Women,” edited by Gina Barreca. A Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English, she also gave an introduction during the reading. 

“Platitudes” was not intended to be read out loud based on its inclusion of slashes to indicate opposite phrases, but the adaptation worked to its benefit during the reading. In this piece, Gee lists both the justifiable and absurd ways in which people judge others and themselves. For example, Gee asked rather seriously, “Has she cheated/was she cheated on?” but balances this with absurd expectations: “She has/has not met Michelle Obama.” Gee writes these lines from a first-person perspective, like she does in virtually all of her stories. “Platitudes” incites laughter from the audience the whole way through, paired with moments of reflection. Gee does so by attracting the audience with relatable thoughts about vanity only to dig deeper into her personal beliefs of motherhood and her career trajectory.  

At first, her efforts were to simply have the stories of her family written down, but this journey has taken a new meaning following her success. Gina Barecca said “Darien finds not only the stories from herself, but from… everybody’s heartbreak, and sanctity, and insecurity,” emphasizing “the need to make the stories that are the deepest… inside of us, public.” Gee herself implied if she knew these stories would be told outside of an inner circle like they are now, she would have been reluctant to write them with such honesty. 

There is an archival focus within these works. She notes that her mother is now 85 years old, so she views her writing as a way to combat the mortality of her family, for their stories must live on. 

This includes stories that her family may not want to hear; nevertheless, their complexity must be recorded. Both “Courtyard” and “Afterlife” are based on Gee’s grandfather’s scandalous relationships, ones that members of her family fail to acknowledge to this day. However, she has come to peace with them for the sake of confronting their reality, no matter how controversial. 

Gee’s reading of “Artifact” touched on her own complicated relationships in an even greater sense. This is part of a collection of her micro-memoirs, “Allegiance,” that won the 2021 Bronze IPPY Award. In this piece, she discusses her estranged relationship with her only sibling, a younger brother, through the metaphors of fissions, faults and fractures. These were based on one of their commonalities: their father was a geophysicist. 

Contrasting descriptions of geophysics with examples of their broken relationship, Gee provides a resolution after the read: she and her brother have been mending their relationship so much that, as of late, he flew out to Hawaii two weeks ago to celebrate her 55th birthday. The framework of the story did not signal a happy ending for the two, despite their undying siblinghood, but it appears that a new narrative has been forged. 

The reading concluded with questions from the audience and a signing of copies of the anthology she edited, titled: “Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World.” 

In addition to the Creative Writing Program, these readings are also made possible by the generosity of Lynn and the late Martin Bloom, former UConn faculty members who created the Bloom Endowment Fund, another sponsor for this program.