MOCA TALKS with Madelyn Postman

Reserve Tickets Become a Member $10 General Admission | $17 General Admission and Signed Book | $5 Student & Senior | Free for MOCA Members The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) invites you to an engaging conversation with writer Madelyn Postman on her debut book Staring into the Sun: Stories from a Chinese American Family 1895–2015, a vivid work that interweaves memoir with the true histories of her Chinese American ancestors. Spanning more than a century, Staring into the Sun traces one family’s journey from a drought-stricken Cantonese village in 1895 to the San Francisco Bay Area and, ultimately, to England in 2015. Through interconnected stories, Postman brings to life generations shaped by migration, exclusion, resilience, and reinvention. From the lasting impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the rise and fall of family fortunes, the book illustrates how personal lives unfold within larger currents of history. Drawing on family records and literary storytelling, Postman creates a multigenerational tapestry that explores race, belonging, mental health, and intergenerational memory. The program will explore how family histories are preserved, reimagined, and passed forward, and what it means to tell stories that bridge both personal and collective pasts. About Madelyn Postman In 2017, Madelyn Postman set out to research and write about her Chinese and Eastern European Jewish ancestors: the two halves of her family that converged in California. After nine years and many rounds of editing, she finished Staring into the Sun, which links memoir and the true stories about the Chinese American side of her family. Her next book will be a contemporary novel which integrates her Eastern European Jewish heritage. Madelyn’s fiction and nonfiction work has been published in the US, the UK, and Australia. In 2025, “Things My Dad Told Me” was shortlisted for The Hope Prize and published by Simon & Schuster Australia in the anthology Tomorrow There Will Be Sun. “Gold Mountain Diggers” featured in Issue 10 of US-based Livina Press. And in the UK, a speculative piece about her great-grandfather Joe Shoong, “His Bones,” was shortlisted for the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and included in the anthology Transformations. A Nevada native who spent her formative years in San Francisco and New England, Madelyn holds a BA in Visual Arts and Art History from Brown University. Her monthly podcast and newsletter, The Spark, features author interviews and reading recommendations. She lives near London with her family. About Staring into the Sun England, 2015. Madelyn dreads telling her young children about her mother, who died by suicide decades earlier. But when her child asks about skin tone and eye color, she’s compelled to share the painful truth. A Cantonese village, 1895. Emigrating to America seems inevitable for teenage Song, whose family is starving during a drought. His grandmother tells him about Chinese emigrants’ ordeals and predicts a fate tha...