Transplants and Change Through Intimacy
Transplants by Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a novel about identity, belonging, immigration, racism, and the beginning of the pandemic. It follows two women who become friends in rural China, then end up on opposite sides of the world. Lin is an American English teacher looking for the truth about her parents, who emigrated from China before she was born. Liz is a Chinese student who studies in—then journeys across—the United States. I want to look at a powerful moment in the very first chapter, before Lin leaves China, before she (or the reader) has met Liz.
First, some craft background. Many writers swear by conflict as the best tool to make things happen in fiction. But better writers know it’s not the only way. Change can also be driven by things like curiosity or growth. Or by my favorite alternate tool: intimacy. When one character opens up to another, either physically or emotionally, they become vulnerable in a new way and so much can happen. Transplants does employ other tools throughout the book, but in the first chapter, intimacy is a strong driving force.
Lin has always been more comfortable with her many pets than she is with people, and she keeps so much to herself that she’s called “the mute” by her roommates. But her English teacher (not Liz—this is a teacher named Travis, who is a white American) is so strange to her that she befriends him the same way she might a snake or a gerbil or a cat.
Eventually, Lin has sex with Travis. She is casual in deciding to do it—figuring that since everyone already thinks they are sexually involved, they might as well be. It is her first time and as first times go in fiction, it’s neither terrible nor amazing. We don’t learn of intense pleasure or pain or disgust. Here’s how it is described:
She tasted a hunger on his lips, a quiet desperation. Travis wrung the shirt over his head and shimmied his pants to the floor. The speed with which he was laid bare startled Lin: an animal stretched out on his hands and knees, ready to ravish his prey. Lin lay down flat on her back. She let him remove her clothes, paw every inch of her skin. She looked up at the ceiling with its square gray panels, not unlike the ones in the room where she’d grown up. A pink speck of insulation showed at each of its corners like the plume of a parakeet. She wondered if there had been birds up there—a whole menagerie—all along, would it have changed how she felt.
I’m interested in the way Travis is described as “an animal stretched out on his hands and knees.” To a different character, that image, and especially “ravish his prey,” would signal alarm, but I don’t think that’s true for Lin. She’s not romantic about how animals behave, and she respects them for it. She has always compared Travis to her pets—it’s how she relates to him.
Then, as she lets him “paw” her (another animalistic detail), she thinks first about her childhood home and then about birds. The insulation brings her mind to a parakeet, but soon she is imagining a whole menagerie. It’s as if she’s mentally flying away. And yet she’s also returning home and to herself, because up to this point her only comfort has been in her pets.
When Travis speaks, he pulls her back to the physical moment. But she makes that her own too.
“I like you, Lin He,” Travis said.
Lin nodded, swallowing a knot in her throat. She had expected he might have done this before, but it didn’t feel practiced or rehearsed. She was surprised by the fine hairs that covered his legs and arms, how some parts of him felt smooth while others were jagged and rough. The way he mouthed words that she couldn’t make out. His breath quickening as he swayed and surged against her. She liked the sensation of being weightless, of feeling the heavy presence of Travis above her, as though she could sink down into the mattress and forget all about her roommates, her mother back home, even the animals sleeping just beyond the closed door. With their clothes off, they were like two creatures in the wild with only their nature to cling to.
It's significant that she observes just one physical detail about Travis’s naked body: “fine hairs that covered his arms and legs.” It’s not fur but it certainly evokes it.
Then consider what happens when she feels both “weightless” and beneath the “heavy presence” of another. It’s paradoxical—two opposing concepts at once and so we hold both. She enjoys this feeling of being both out of her body and all the way inside it, escaping and returning.
It’s important to note the precise phrasing of the next clause. Her enjoyment of the sex, the weightlessness and the sinking and forgetting, is not in actually forgetting the people and animals in her life, but “as if she could.” The sentence claims she is moving away from those things, or at least her loyalty to them—she could forget them. But she doesn’t. And her listing of what she could forget, paradoxically (again) reinforces them for the reader. This is always true. A negation necessarily imprints a sensory image of what it claims to take away.
And of course: “With their clothes off, they were like two creatures in the wild with only their nature to cling to.” I love the strangeness of that sentence. Clinging to their nature is metaphorical, of course, but my mental image is of them clinging to each other. It makes the sex feel more primal, somehow. “Nature” is not used in the sense of the natural world, but in the sense of their innate being. Still, it makes us think of that natural world. Lin understands herself as an animal in this moment and as connected to nature.
Yet, despite my mental image, the focus is notably not her connection to Travis. Rather, he’s a conduit to reach something else. The sentence does not describe Lin clinging to Travis but to that nature that is both the vast and wild world of animals and her most true self.
The single bird spins to a menagerie. Lin’s solitary body becomes part of something much bigger—all of nature. This is a theme of the book, by the way: Lin’s quest to understand herself is very much involved with community and belonging vs individualism.
And so Lin’s movement beyond herself and into herself is located very tangibly in the sex and how it is described, though at a level of subtext that a casual reader might sense but not quite articulate in the moment.
This makes it satisfying when Lin notices the change, the opening of self, the escape and the return. Just a moment later, she names it and reacts to it.
Lin was surprised by how light she felt, how comfortable she was in her own skin. She tossed the sheets back, baring herself to the halogen light.… There were no societal conventions, no thousands of years of expectations to underperform. For the first time, Lin realized she could feel accepted—wanted, even—in all her startling difference.
Thus the act of intimacy has opened her up to a new sort of freedom. After sex, it’s not the cliché of shame or regret, she feels. Neither is it love or lust or obsession. She doesn’t think about Travis much at all, but she has found a new comfort in herself that is simultaneously quiet and earth shattering.
A moment of intimacy—of vulnerability—can open a character to this sort of change or revelation of self. It knocks something loose so a new shape can form, just as effectively as conflict (or another tool) can.
Throughout the book, Lin’s sense of self goes through many shifts and transformations; her confidence deflates, and she questions her place in the world, again and again. She also leaves Travis far behind. But it’s still important to the character and to the book that this glorious early moment happens.