Hello everybody, how are you?

Welcome to the program.

This is The Other People Show.

I am Brad Listy here in Los Angeles.

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My guest today is Jenny Shia, author of the debut novel Holding Pattern. Up until I went to kindergarten,

like my first day of kindergarten, I only spoke Mandarin.

And so being thrown into this new environment, I really felt like I had to like understand the language.

I mean, I had to understand the language just to understand what was going on.

And that became like really, I came really hungry for language.

So I read a lot. I wrote a lot.

I felt imperative.

And then I think in like trying to keep up or like trying to be American or whatever it was,

then I realized like, oh, this is really cool and really fun.

And I love not just like the practical aspects of this, but like how transportive it is.

Okay, that was Jenny Shia.

Her debut novel Holding Pattern is available now from Riverhead.

And it is a novel to me that feels very much like a novel about being in one's 20s.

Holding pattern is about a young woman named Kathleen who returns home

after going through a difficult breakup.

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