Helen Wan’s novel, “The Partner Track,” is to be published September 17. It looks at the subtle ways race, gender and class play out in modern professional work spaces (CNN).
When Helen Wan was still a law school student, she noticed a pattern in books marketed toward Asian-American women.
“It’s the same formula every time,” she wrote for the Washington Post in 1998. “Young Asian-American heroine confronts culture clash — unyielding Asian parents who won’t let her on the cheerleading squad, a flock of quaint-as-hell relatives, yadda, yadda. Throw in a budding interracial romance, stick a word like ‘moon,’ ‘jade’ or ‘dragon’ in the title, and voila! America’s new literary sensation. Give me a break. I could write an ‘ethnic’ novel in my sleep.”
