About me

I was made in Taiwan to be an electrical engineer. In my last year of college, an exchange program at the University of British Columbia took me to Vancouver, and I kept going: to New York City for a PhD at Columbia Business School, then on to Los Angeles, where I worked briefly at the X Prize Foundation. After an almost-PhD in Decision Science, I experimented with acting, singing, and clowning before deciding very practically to be a writer.

After the pandemic, my marriage with a good man ended amicably 25 years after we met. As is mandatory for a middle-aged divorcée, I traveled to Bali and Peru and lived my version of Eat, Pray, Out-Of-Love.

My post-divorce adventure culminated in an ayahuasca ceremony near the Amazonian jungle, where for the first time I thanked my mother for giving me life and said goodbye to her forty-three years after she died giving birth to my sister (the true-life event that inspired my short story “Treasure Island Alley,” which was selected for Best American Short Stories 2023).

Now, midway through the journey of my life, I find myself in Lisbon, Portugal–the fourth country I’m adopting and adopting me. I had wandered off a path, once again experiencing growing pains on my third and probably-not-final continent.  

Da-Lin is my writing alter ego. It means, literally, Big Lin, which is my counter-reaction to a common Chinese practice of adding the prefix “small” to any surname to turn it into a diminutive. My birth name, in Chinese, is Lin Ching-Hua, which means a forest of green birch. My aspiration is to grow my work into a big forest, filled with wondrous creatures and their songs. Outside my writing, people call me Claire, from the Latin clarus, meaning clear and bright. But my favorite meaning is the French one: a claire is a shallow pond where oysters are left to fatten and ripen into a delicacy, the fines de claire. I like to think I’m still ripening.

I explore time, death, and cultural clashes in my writing with a dash of weird.  I have won the PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship, the James Kirkwood Literary Prize of UCLA, and a Pushcart Prize. My fiction has appeared in New England Review, Colorado Review, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and Best American Short Stories.

My work in progress includes a short story collection, a novel, and a memoir disguised as a self-help manual. Yeah, focus, I know.