Sarah Zhang is a Hakka American immigrant who moved from a northern port city called Tianjin, China to Hawaii at five years old. For many years, her mom worked as a housekeeper while her dad, a science prodigy from a fishing village in Anhui, looked for work. He dealt for many years with the aftermath of the technology bubble after graduating with his master’s in Computer Science from the University of Hawaii.
During her elementary school years, she had lived briefly at a Chinese boarding home while dad looked for work on the East Coast. Eventually, both her parents found stable work and Sarah worked her way up from her middle school gifted and talented class to a scholarship student at the top private school in the state, Punahou Academy. Her favorite childhood novel is “The Giver” by Lowis Lowry.
Punahou Academy felt like four years of Heaven. There she had friends to do homework with, watch movies with, decorate with on Christmas. She found a world more vividly beautiful than the one she had previously known. She later attended Duke University and graduated with a major in English.
Not long after returning home from college, jobless and friendless, she decided to make a terrible decision to apply to medical school. It really opened her eyes to how the real world worked, who was who, what discrimination and world issues were like.
She was diagnosed after turning in her graduate school applications with schizophrenia. For the duration of over a year, she was talking to herself, imagining that she had a make-believe boyfriend and learning about magic. She spent a month attending Touro Medical School in Las Vegas, experiencing the debauchery of the upper crust, when a professor sent her to the Rawson-Neel Psych Ward. She was picked up and her mom took her to see Red Rock Canyon before heading back to Hawaii.
Sarah recovered her sanity since then, though the year-long episode created a debilitating brain damage that doctors say couldn’t be cured. She was devastated and briefly contemplated suicide. She hasn’t been back in the psych ward in over six years.
Recovery was a struggle. But her brain damage did improve and she made friends through a support group, walked along the beach side in Kaneohe, and eventually found love with someone who doesn’t have a mental illness. She will never forget the people who first lent her a hand during those early days of hardship.
After self-publishing her debut novel, “Night in NYC,” her grandmother decided to tell her about her ancestors, who for the past five or six centuries lived in round walled villages called Tulou in the heart of Meizhou, China. Hakka culture is heavily based on a good value system, hard work and saving lives. My great grandparents became wealthy soap manufacturers in Indonesia and saved many lives during the Indonesian Civil War.
Sarah’s favorite genres of writing include fantasy, magical realism, Asian American literature, speculative fiction, creative nonfiction and mental health. She likes the variety and enjoys trying out new writing styles and incorporating new trends.
