Mixed Feelings

Mixed Feelings is a lyrical, genre-bending memoir in essays that traces the life of a queer, Chinese German American woman growing up in a bilingual household in California. With curiosity and emotional precision, Jennifer Tseng explores the questions that shape a life-love, identity, belonging, grief, and the complexities of multilingual and intercultural experience.

Moving fluidly between memory, books, and images, she creates a kaleidoscopic narrative that shifts from the domestic to the literary, the private to the social. In these intimate, incisive essays, Tseng reveals how the particularities of her 1970s and '80s upbringing illuminate the world we inhabit now, offering readers a meditation on what is lost, found, and transformed in translation.