Lillian Tsay was born in upstate New York and raised in Taiwan. After graduating from college in Taipei, she moved to Tokyo and lived there for four years. She is currently writing a dissertation on food and empire in modern East Asia at Brown University. Besides her scholarly works, her creative writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Milk Candy Review, and some publications in Chinese. This is her first creative nonfiction in English.