ABOUT

Jiachen Wang is a bilingual writer from Shenyang and Shanghai, China. He is a 2026-2028 Stegner Fellow at Stanford and an alumnus of the Cornell MFA Program, where he also taught. He has completed the Chinese/English manuscript of a short story collection titled Stealing Fire and is currently working on a second story collection called Far Country as well as a novel.

Selected stories in English

“Jade Blood”‍ ‍Meridian, April 2026.

“On our way to the mountains we always passed a frozen lagoon. Its surface was blue and glittered under the sun. Old Piao said it was called Red Rainbow Lagoon and many years ago a girl had drowned there. No one knew her name, but the villagers all called her the Red Rainbow Girl. Her mother had died giving birth to her. For many years she lived alone with her father, the local teacher, who cherished her more than anything in the world. On that particular day, she was getting water from the well when a group of Russian soldiers saw her. Astonished by her beauty, they abducted her to the lagoon and wanted to rape her there. But after they had ripped off her garment she freed herself and ran to the beach. Two clumps of white snow leapt from her bosom. She jumped into the water and swaggered toward the center of the lagoon. Gradually water immersed her head. The soldiers stood on the beach and laughed at her in a language she could not understand.

Suddenly the youngest among the soldiers took off his uniform and jumped in. Maybe he was trying to save her, but as he swam near her his blue eyes frightened her. She headed farther into the deep water and drowned there. It was a beautiful evening and a red rainbow hung in the eastern sky like a bridge leading nowhere. And that was how the lagoon had gotten its name. Soon the soldiers left, leaving empty vodka bottles rolling around the beach. When the news reached the father his heart was broken. He sprinted to the lagoon, kneeled down, and began cursing the sky. Before he could finish his sentence, a lightning came down from the clouds and struck him dead. There was a great rock on the beach. It was where the father had once knelt. His knees had left two marks there and to this day they could still be seen.”

“New Year” ‍ ‍New Ohio Review, June 2026.

Ellis Prize for Fiction, finalist.

“Every morning our father went under the bridge to collect the coal scattered along the railroad tracks. On a good day, he could fill three sacks and sell them for twenty yuan. On Sundays, he brought me and my brother with him. Sometimes the pieces I put in my sack were no good and he had to pick them out one by one. It was very difficult for him to bend down. This made me think that perhaps everyone in this world had some kind of clockwork inside their bodies, except that the one inside our father had not been oiled for a long time. That’s why it’d become so rusty.

For seven years we lived in a warehouse. It belonged to the government but had been mostly unoccupied. Every month, Old Liu from the train station would receive something from our father (in a good month, a carton of cigarettes; in a bad month, two bottles of baijiu), and he’d let us live here rent-free. Behind the warehouse stood a garbage mountain that looked like Kilimanjaro in winter but smelled terrible in summer. The inside of the warehouse was similar to a deep well. When we talked it sounded as if we were underwater. At the end of the storage racks was a little room with two plank beds and no light except for a lamp I used to do homework. That was where we lived. After dark, my favorite thing to do was climb up the pipe to the rooftop. Standing there I could always recognize, from the lights afar, the Ferris Wheel in South Lake Park.”

“Treasured Sword” Sand Hill Magazine, Forthcoming.

“The Whistler” Mississippi Review, Forthcoming.

“Snow” Epoch, Forthcoming.