The Beginning of the East

by Max Yeh

262pp | Forthcoming November 2025 | Paperback | ISBN 978-1-885030-84-9

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Made available again by Kaya Press for the first time in decades, Beginning of the East is an audacious high-wire grappling with the world-making powers of the literary imagination as filtered through experiences of an American scholar of Chinese descent and his attempt to map out the impact of Columbus’ “aberrations, delusions, and fantasies” on the brutality and political posturing of the American present—and thus on himself. Having already uprooted himself and his family from California to Mexico City, the narrator is even more radically unmoored when an earthquake forces him into an acute awareness of the physicality of experience. He begins to consider how such details help to render visible the motivations behind the construction and reconstruction of both self and culture. This dazzling tapestry of interconnected stories travels both east to a mythic Cathay and west to the New World, sliding between points of view and time periods ranging from fifteenth-century sailors to 1980s El Salvadoran prisoners of conscience to demonstrate what can be wrought by the imagination. “So there were many beginnings, for the explanation of America was also an explanation of the world to be [. . .] and all the beginnings coincided in Columbus.”