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Author Talk | Radha Lin Chaddah

Join author Radha Lin Chaddah as she discusses "And the Ancestors Sing," a multigenerational novel of sacrifice, survival, and the unbreakable pull of home, set against the rapidly changing backdrop of post-Cultural Revolution China.

In 1978, as the Cultural Revolution fades into history, Lei is bartered away into marriage for two cartons of cigarettes and a handful of eggs. She finds herself in the unfamiliar village of her new husband where she is met with indifference. When a disaster upends their world, she and her husband are forced to join China’s vast wave of city-bound, rural migrants, leaving behind children whom they may never see again.

Sixteen-year-old LuLu arrives in Shanghai with nothing but ambition. Denied a factory job and determined to keep her family from starving, she turns to sex work—navigating the dangers of the city’s underbelly with sharp wit and a fierce will to survive. When a powerful client offers her a chance at security, LuLu faces an impossible choice: seize a future that could lift her family from poverty, or risk everything for a life on her own terms.

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Radha Lin Chaddah was born in London to an East Indian father and a Malaysian Chinese mother, and grew up in Kenya, the UK, and the US. She majored in Biology at the University of Chicago, earned medical and law degrees at the University of Illinois, and a Master of Public Health at Harvard University. She completed her Internal Medicine residency training, and later practiced at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston. Radha also worked as a primary care physician in NYC and Beijing, worked with the China CDC to co-write the book, HIV/ AIDS: Beyond the Numbers, and has provided mental healthcare to patients in several states as a telemedicine doctor.

Moderator Janelle M. Williams received her BA from Howard University and her MFA in creative writing from Manhattanville College. She was the recipient of Prairie Schooner's Lawrence Foundation Award for her short story, "From the Closest Waffle House,"  and was a 2017 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Shenandoah, Passages North, Split Lip Magazine, and Lunch Ticket, among others. She is currently the Director of Programs and Outreach at Writopia Lab.

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