"Ambitious and brave, this book is a lyric meditation not just on identity, but authenticity." Jamie Ford, NY Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet Fay Wu Goodson is a 25-year-old queer, multiracial woman who documents the identity journeys of other New Yorkers. She finds her videography work meaningful, but more importantly, it distracts her from investigating the challenges of her own life and keeps relationships at a distance. When the family's Taiwanese patriarch dies, Fay's Asian grandmother moves to America; and Fay, her mother, and her aunt learn unsettling truths about their family and each other. They must decide to finally confront themselves, or let their pasts destroy everything each woman has dreamed of and worked for. An unconventional story of an Asian-American matriarchy, THE BALANCE TIPS is a complex and moving literary exploration of Taiwanese-American female roles in family, sexual identity, racism, and the internal struggles fostered by Confucian patriarchy.
Industry Reviews
"Ava Ling Magee, the central figure in Joy Huang Stoffers's debut novel, is a work in progress. She struggles to come to terms with a domineering mother and an absent father, with self-doubt, with being a friend and having friends, with shocks that emerge from the past. Stoffers weaves an engaging tale about searching for identity and growing toward self-knowledge and independence." -- Paul Spickard, author of Race in Mind, and Professor of History and Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Barbara (on Whasian )
"How exciting to see Joy Huang Stoffers join the ranks of writers like Sarah Jamila Stevenson and Matt de la Pena who write about the challenges of being a mixed-race teen. Anyone who has lived betwixt and between cultures and racial identities will find their stories reflected here in this honest and enriching tale." -- Heidi W Durrow, author of the New York Times bestseller The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (on Whasian )
" Whasian deftly tackles the difficult task of naming an identity that continues to be invisible; we mixed race Asian Americans have found a powerful voice in Joy Huang Stoffers, who, as she tells her story, reveals so many of ours." -- Wei Ming Dariotis, co-editor of War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, and Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, SFSU
"Ambitious and brave, this book is a lyric meditation not just on identity, but authenticity." -- Jamie Ford, NY Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
"This is the mixed-race novel we all need in 2021." -- Jackson Bliss, author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, Amnesia of June Bugs, & Dream Pop Origami
