All That's Left Unsaid

Author Spotlight

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT: TRACY LIEN unsaidAll That’s Left

by Priti Lakhani // PhotograPhy by aLison grasso

What does it feel like to live under the myth of the model minority, to be a conditional citizen and to feel like your home country is embracing you with one arm while pushing you away with the other? This is the question author Tracey Lien hopes to answer in the debut novel “All That’s Left Unsaid,” which takes place in Cabramatta (a suburb of Sydney, Australia) in the 1990s during a heroin epidemic.

Cabramatta’s population is primarily Asian, with 75% constituting people from Vietnam, China and Cambodia. During the ’70s, servicemen brought heroin to Sydney from Southeast Asia, and Cabramatta soon became a distribution point for Australia. This coincided with the arrival of refuges from Vietnam, many of whom were young, victims of war and desperate to escape. This “perfect storm” led to the rise of gangs, drugs and violence, making Cabramatta a war zone in the ’90s, and a backdrop for a novel about what it means to be an outsider.

Lien hopes to make a connection with her readers so they can understand the mix of what it means to grow up marginalized and poor, with overworked and underpaid parents struggling with untreated or undiagnosed PTSD and loneliness. And what it is to have to shoulder the burden as the next generation to be perfect, never complain and work hard – harder than everyone else – because on some level, your status as an equal citizen when you are an immigrant or refugee is never really guaranteed.

As a teenager in Australia, Lien often read a magazine called Dolly (akin to Teen Vogue), voraciously consuming the human-interest stories, which she still recalls.

“Those stories connected with me. They taught me, changed the way I thought, saw the world and behaved,” she says. “To this day, I can still remember details from articles I read back in 2002. I realized then that this is a profession, a job that allows me to connect with a reader and change the way that they see the world and the way they behave, and maybe change the way that they think, even in some small way.”

Hooked on storytelling, she began her career as a journalist, writing human interest stories for the Los Angeles Times.

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Tracey Lien

Lien then sharpened this narrative in Lawrence, living in the “Barmuda Triangle” while earning an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Kansas.

“I remember how much her writing sample on her application stood out,” Moriarty says professor Laura Moriarty, her advisory at KU. “Her prose, even then, was vibrant and detailed, and she had a great ear for dialogue. While she was here, she soaked up every opportunity for feedback and inspiration, and she was tireless about revision.”

While at KU, Lien won a Langston Hughes Award, and her short stories began getting published.

“She remained so wonderfully supportive of her fellow writers in the program,” Moriarty says. “By the time she turned in her revised novel as her thesis, I knew publishers would be fighting over it, and I was right! We all miss her here, but the whole department is delighted by her welldeserved success.”

In October, Lien paid a visit to current creative writing students at KU, hoping to inspire them. She recalled that one of her favorite things to do while she was a student involved her trips to a local bookstore.

“I was at the Raven Bookstore every week. I would swing in, and I would look every Tuesday at the books that came out in the new fiction display table. As a creative writing grad student, you can’t help to hope that maybe one day your book would be there,” she says. While back in Lawrence in October, she saw her book on that same Raven table.

“I just stood there and stared at it for a bit. I looked at the company it was in. Obviously, no one who was there had any idea who I was. I was just someone who was standing for a really long, time at that table,” Lien recalls. n

“All That’s Left Unsaid” was chosen to be on Oprah’s Favorite Things list for 2022. It will be on a lot of tables at many bookstores. If you see a woman standing and staring at it, it may just be Lien.