A Year in Reading: Sunisa Manning
In January of 2020 I was in Singapore, where my debut novel was a finalist for an award, then home in Bangkok, where I hugged my grandparents and gorged myself on green curry and som tam. Did I sense it was going to be a long time before I could return? There was talk of a virus coming out of China. I flew back to California with Meng Jin’s Little Gods in hand, my dear friend’s smart re-up of the immigration narrative, where a Chinese American protagonist goes to China to uncover the secrets of her brilliant mother’s past. In February my husband and I came down with pneumonia, which was perhaps covid, though we got negative results. Everything confusing and wonderful and difficult about the year would come to be foreboded in that rapid beginning.
I know from pregnancy and postpartum how much reading returns me to myself. When everything about sent me to , a long novel, a capacious tent, whose folds hid me for what I have come to think of as Pandemic One.
