The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Fall Literature Grant to Catherine Bai for her upcoming fiction project, tentatively titled Five Diptychs.

 Five Diptychs is a translingual, experimental short story collection that is interested in language and blood ties, the burden of being loved too much, and the helplessness of living within the various and inexorable “breakups” that define a Chinese American condition. The work is also driven by a diasporic ache for “return,” mediated through sensuality and connections with the natural world and thwarted by failures of communication and the instability of selfhood and cultural authenticity.

 These stories will be interconnected not by plot or character but by gestures of language—passages that reappear verbatim in another piece, jumping contexts, lives, and voices across the chasm of the “breakup” between the fictions. In this way, each of the ten pieces will constitute half of a diptych—a structure that illuminates the inherent helplessness in the condition of holding two separate worlds simultaneously, without hope of being integrated, whole, or unified. Each of these worlds is coherent, uninterrupted, and seemingly “complete,” until one sees the other, and their link cannot be readily perceived, much like the familial love—reaching across alien cultures and languages—that the work longs to render whole.

 Catherine Bai is the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and a residency grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her fiction was longlisted for the 2025 Disquiet Prize, appears in Best Debut Short Stories 2022, and is forthcoming in AGNI. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Luna Luna Magazine and the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.

 Please visit Catherine's Instagram for more information.