Babylon, South Dakota

by Tom Lin

Genres: Colonization; Asian American; Family Life; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Magical Realism; Sagas

Synopsis

From the author of the Carnegie Medal in Fiction winner The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu comes a tantalizing, American West saga about a Chinese American family trying to survive on their Dakota farm as a powerful, mysterious, and morally dubious military secret shapes their lives.
 
When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara. 

But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu’s farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America’s nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of power and empire.

In the years and generations that follow, increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm. An ambitious epic and an ode to the beauty and glory of our connection to the natural world, Babylon, South Dakota upends the idea of "strangers in a strange land" to become a classic American story. It is a daring novel about how choices reverberate across generations and asks us what we owe to one another.

Release date: May 26, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 336

Sample

Called to this distant land by the death of an unknown kinsman and the promise of a new life came Hsiu Keng and his wife, Lee Mei, thirty-seven and thirty-three, who owned together but one suitcase full of clothes and an old leather knapsack filled with treasures that had survived the furor of the revolution: untranslated documents attesting to their births and marriage, three and a half misshapen taels of gold, a jade pendant carved into the shape of a monkey, a red coral bracelet too small for either of their wrists, a little booklet of family photographs, a transistor radio, and a silk bag of chrysanthemum seeds. They took possession of one hundred and sixty acres of soil that sloped, south to north across folded ridges, down to an overgrown pasture.

Standing on the proud rise to the southeast, the whole of this abundance of useless land could be seen on a clear day, all the way to the distant northwestern corner. On this high vantage the new arrivals found their home, a huge and low-slung ranch house with six rooms of interchangeable purpose, each about the same size, even the kitchen. Neat little piles of fine yellow dust beveled the corners of each room and smoothed the squared edges of windowsills and crown molding and doorjambs. A thick layer of this same dust had accumulated on the floors as well and as they wandered through the place, their bare feet left clear and outlined footprints of sudden spotlessness on the wood floors.

On that first day the stale air inside was quiet and smelled of cloves. Most of the furniture had long ago been removed and auctioned off, except those which were too large or too worthless, and the two newcomers encountered these hulking remainders as they wandered through the empty house in the failing light. In what must have once been a bedroom, Lee Mei found an enormous four-post sandalwood bed with a platform of woven reeds supporting an undersized mattress. And in the kitchen, Hsui Keng found a rolling pantry with long shallow drawers, full of small and desiccated insects, that reminded him of the specimen drawers at the natural history museum of his half-remembered childhood. Scattered about the floor of a closet they found sheaves of old documents, old blueprints and contracts and records whose text they could not yet read, and, not knowing whether these documents had been left there on purpose, they collected these pages into boxes and returned them reverently to the closet where they had been before. As the chill of their first evening set in, they crouched by the ancient woodstove that dominated what was to become their living room and, with difficulty, managed to light a fire, though they soon realized that they had neglected to gather enough firewood to last the night. In the end, still fully dressed, they slept on the floor, curled like cats toward the cooling coals and their ash-shelled glow.

They spoke Chinese as their ancestors had for numberless winters before them and now they endeavored to speak English in halting cadence, this new language round and slippery on their tongues like bites of plum. From what little they retained from their schooling they knew to invert their names. And so he became Keng Hsiu and she Mei Lee, in order that they might more seamlessly begin their long and asymptotic assimilation into these old and unfamiliar hills. Indeed, going a step further than even his wife thought necessary, he sought to adopt for himself a new name entirely, one fit for this new country, and, searching through the inscrutable English of the cheap Bible given them on their arrival, he found for himself one whose look and shape he admired: thus was he remade as Saul Keng Hsiu. And yet his wife remained Mei Lee, refusing even to change her surname to Hsiu as new custom demanded, because, as she grew fond of saying, the Lee bloodline was always destined to end with her death—for was she not the only daughter of Lee Ts’eng, and he the only son of Lee Bai-shun—and she thought it disrespectful to hasten this lineal end by submitting to some foreign tradition to which she accorded no worth. When Saul half seriously pointed out to Mei that there were plenty of other Lees not only in China but probably everywhere on earth, she responded in a quick and precise voice that her concern was not with the absolute number of Lees in the world and that Saul was being purposefully obtuse, and then did not speak to Saul for the rest of the day and most of the following morning until, driven nearly to madness, he apologized to her. Though the silence was especially difficult in those early days, Mei judged it needful; it was important that Saul be reminded of her value by being made to experience her lack.

One morning not long after their arrival Mei wrapped the half-tael of gold in rags, bound the small and heavy package tightly with twine, and dispatched Saul into town to sell it. He did so in the afternoon, transmuting metal into dollars with the lockjaw stoicism of a man resigned to the gallows. They had always planned on selling the gold upon arrival—this was why they had brought it with them, after all—but Saul had balked the night before and paced around their scarcely furnished house, his eyes hungry, looking for anything else he could sell.

It’s only metal, Mei had said with infinite grace, and we can’t eat metal.

But Saul countered that it wasn’t only metal but gold—gold so pure they could dig their fingernails into its glossy mass, and moreover gold with sentimental value, because it had once formed part of the bridewealth that his father had paid to his mother’s family before they were married. Surely that counted for something. They passed the lump of gold back and forth across the table as they talked in hushed voices, all the lights in the house dark but for a candle burning between them, and their touch drove warmth into the gold until it reached body heat like some extracorporeal organ which husband and wife shared.

Once, in the receding past of their homeland, they had heard of people who talked of riches too openly, who counted their money in bright rooms with the windows left wide open, who weighed gold and called out figures and sums within earshot of greedier men, and who, during the revolution, were finally betrayed by those friends and neighbors who found they could not help but do something about such wealth so vulnerable for the taking. And so Mei and Saul became cautious to the point of paranoia, for only the paranoid could dream up such burdensome protocols for the tabulation of wealth: the drawing of blinds, the dimming of lights, the lowering of voices to barely above a whisper. Many years later, the children of their children too would sit at darkened tables and thumb through cash under their breath by faintest moonlight without ever knowing why.

When Saul returned from town that evening with one hundred and twelve dollars and a sick feeling of having been swindled, Mei kissed him gently on the cheek and together, by the light of a single candle, they counted the bills over and over again, reciting incantations of reduplicative magic which Saul did not take seriously but in which Mei wholeheartedly believed, having as a young girl seen a traveling magician take her beloved rabbit and produce for her its exact twin. In the morning Saul broke caution and counted the bills again in the warming pink glow of dawn and found to his delight that the money had grown by an additional hundred dollars. Whooping with joy, he woke his wife, exclaiming that the two bills must have been newcut and clung together as a single note through all their twilight countings. Mei peered at the duplicate note with a look of bored unsurprise; she knew it was her prayerful mumblings that had conjured up this windfall. Whether due to the pawnbroker’s carelessness or Mei’s improbable magic, the tale of the second hundred became a sacred family legend like so many of the stories from this time in their lives, a time when everything was perfused with the newness of their dislocation.

Winter being not far, their days became consumed by the clearing and tilling of their vast and unproductive land. Half of the money from Saul’s miraculous sale went immediately toward buying a season’s stock of flour and oil and salt, while the other half was reserved for whatever they decided to do with the land, though on this matter they soon found themselves at an impasse.

From their naive surveys of the land in those first few weeks they were able to reconstruct a rudimentary map of the property that was now their bounded world. Toward the east was a confusion of corrals and fences that had rotted into loam where they fell, and beyond this a jumble of wrought iron and shattered glass that must have once been a greenhouse. Mei drew the map while Saul drove their ancient truck down almost-erased dirt roads and together they uncovered a hidden logic in the placements of these old structures. On its interpretation, however, they differed. For Saul, the traces were those of a vast flower-growing operation which resembled the hyacinth plantations of his distant youth. Yet where he saw the remnants of flower beds and hybridizing sheds, Mei saw the preserved vectors of seasonal movements and pastures. Near the softening foundations of a once-large building was a sunbaked field of clay that bore an inscrutable texture of rises and divots, like the magnified surface of a peach pit, and these Mei read as cattle hoofprints. See, she said, gesturing to the pockmarked dirt, see? And Saul peered closely, lifting and lowering his wireframe glasses, as though he could arrive at some truer vision by toggling between these two modes of sight available to him, and after some time could only say that he could not see what Mei was talking about, and that maybe it was but a trick of the light. Later, when he looked at the map again, he saw that Mei had gone ahead and drawn in herds of cattle and calving barns anyway.

Together with their ignorance of the precise turn of events that had led to their inheritance of the property, their differing delusions about the originary purpose of the land hardened into conflicting intentions. Where Saul wanted flowers, one hundred and sixty acres of them in every color, rippling with the wind, there did Mei want animals of flesh and bone who could be shuttled from pasture to verdant pasture, whose movements could be controlled as pieces upon a chessboard, and whose procreations could be branded and counted and slaughtered as living wealth. It was important, they agreed, that their work upon the land should continue what had always already been done.

The bag of chrysanthemum seeds in their knapsack of ancestral treasures was Saul’s, given him by his mother, its contents shaken loose from the dozens of blossoms that once filled the central garden of the Hsiu ancestral home and which were scythed and torched on the night that men—boys, really—had battered down their gates, denounced them as collaborators, and beaten them by firelight. So much of that night and the nights following had twisted into a single matted tapestry of the same warp of misery: chrysanthemums, his mother, fires in their gardens, a sign around his neck. As he placed time between himself and the revolution he could feel those sufferings meshing and fusing into an incoherent story without cause or end, a singular narrative in which there was always a heavy wooden sign that announced his sins against the people and their proletarian struggle, and the thin-gauge galvanized steel wire from which it hung, cutting into his neck, a bright track of pain that encircled him and reduced his universe until there was nothing but the white-hot weight of the wire carving into his flesh as though through ice. And much later, as Saul carried his ancient frame from room to room in that withering house, his mind atrophying from want of use, this is what he would come to remember, which is to say only fragments and feelings, a bitterness hovering repugnant over dreams that by then would have the texture of the real.

But in those early days he still hoped for remarkable things, and so he announced to Mei his intention to plant those seeds and revive the floriculture of this land as he read it, and indeed to revive the kaleidoscope fields of his youth. He was the furthest thing from a pragmatist, seeing solid futures in the smoke of controlled burns, and so he could not help but place stock in a future he might bring about through the activity of faith alone. Mei was a different kind of creature, her features pinched out of drier clay. In accordance with principles of pasture and silage she imagined a different kind of future than did her bright-eyed husband.

During the deepening fall of their first year, she and Saul had arguments that rattled the windows and scattered the rats, for there was only enough money to commit to flowers or to ranching. The land was cryptic and bashful and refused to confirm either her or Saul’s reading of its true purpose. At last they compromised, deciding to pursue both options halfway despite their both agreeing that only cowards took pride in compromise. So Saul marked and tilled deep gouges in the earth, racing first frost. In his silk bag were many thousands of chrysanthemum seeds, enough to plant fields upon fields of flowers, and so taking only a quarter of his stock he sowed Chinese chrysanthemums over the furrows of an irrecoverable past. And even as the world spun to a lacerating winter he clung tightly to his faith in a future carpeted by the flowers of his ancestors and his forsaken homeland. Mei purchased four laying hens, a mean old rooster, two billy goats, and a spiteful old mule named Rascal. In addition to these creatures, she bought six head of cattle at far below market price from a man who had almost certainly stolen them. In the isolate stillness of an October snowfall that laid snowdrifts thirty and forty feet deep on the lee side of the windbreak aspens, Mei heated the Hsiu ranch sigil in a coke fire to screaming incandescence and one after another she branded the animals on their flanks, raising another layer of keloids atop the overlapping brands that the cattle already sported.

There, she said, the fog of her breath blending with the smoke of singed hairs and flesh. Now they’re ours.

The first winter Saul and Mei endured would be harsher than the next six combined. Its violence all but annihilated Saul’s chrysanthemums, sparing twenty of nearly two thousand. Though these remaining plants were severely frost-scarred, over the next two months, painstakingly, with heat lamps and fish emulsion, in the sunniest room of their house, Saul managed to nurse them back from the edge of death and then into an astonishing profusion of blossoms. From these survivors would spring a hardy lineage, impervious to frost and invulnerable to disease, whose hybridizations would someday beget chrysanthemums that might never die.

Though Mei’s animals fared better, being more robust than Saul’s glasslike seedlings, that unimaginably cold first winter extracted a tithe from even these hardy creatures. A calf born in the midst of a December blizzard lost part of its right ear to frost, and over the next few weeks Saul and Mei could only watch as a creeping infection hollowed the young animal out from the inside. Then, during an early March storm, the adolescent calf lay down quietly on its side and did not get up again. Its mother did not seem to care. And the next day the calf was gone, replaced only by a long scar in an otherwise perfect snowfield, its mass transmuted into howls and snarls and waste heat by a wolf that Saul would never manage to see in the flesh before he passed.

As the days lengthened into a heady spring Mei counted the weeks since her last and realized she was pregnant and in the midst of their second winter, much milder than the first, she bore a daughter who did not cry when she emerged but instead gazed with dark eyes up through the ceiling, tracking the torque of stars she had yet to see. And when Saul asked what the girl’s name would be, Mei smoothed the fine black hair on the child’s slick head and said that her name would be Mara.

When Mara was seven months old, Saul brought home a television he had found on the side of the road on his way back from town. Mei complained when Saul dragged it into the living room—they had no use for a black-and-white set some fifteen years old which had from its very first day already been obsolete, let alone one that had probably been thrown out because it had broken. But, to everyone’s disbelief, the television still worked, though poorly, since its antenna had snapped off nearly at the hilt. The first time they turned it on, Mara clapped her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head. The television was utterly silent—corrosion had welded the volume knob to zero—and yet, as Saul observed to Mei, there must have been some portion of the sound that still existed and which escaped their hearing but not their daughter’s. Mei wondered aloud what it might sound like to Mara and briefly, mother and father together imagined what it might be like to hear this sound beyond perception.

The next day, Saul emptied an entire can of bolt-loosener onto the shaft of the volume dial, clamped a vise-grip onto the Bakelite, and gave it a thundering blow. With a shower of rust and polymer shards, the dial itself disintegrated. While Mei swept up the debris that night and asked what Saul had done, he answered by triumphantly pinching what remained of the volume dial with his fingernails and summoning the philharmonic into their living room. Most nights, the television had trouble picking up much of anything, but that night, a temperature inversion over the northern plains permitted the signal of the orchestra to pass. It was unabashed celebration. The shapes of one hundred suited men and women cradling smudges of brass and wood in odd contortions found momentary substance on that phosphor screen. As Saul turned the volume higher, a broad smile crept across his and Mei’s faces. There was the flash of a conductor’s baton and then suddenly there was music, a waltz, and Saul took Mei’s broom and leaned it against the wall and now, to the crackling lilt of a concerto, they waltzed through their spartan home, giddy with feeling not simply for the delight of the music but also for his mangled choreography, for her squinting through her hair as it flew into her face, and for the sound that rang through the room—squealing laughter, as Mara watched her parents whirling through the world. Later, Saul bent a small lollipop of wire and soldered it to the stub of the volume dial. Good as new, he said, demonstrating the repair to Mei.

Careful not to ask too much of their windfall, the family soon developed a precise ritual of television-watching that began with Mei gingerly turning it on and Saul moving the stub of the antenna by fractional twitches of the smallest muscles of his fingers until an image consolidated on the screen. When the television had been thus coaxed into momentary operation they would draw back, reverently, and watch whatever happened to be on. In those early years most of what they saw was incomprehensible to them and, in this absence of understanding, the myriad programs, serious and unserious, factual and fictive, all blended together into an omnibus entertainment, broadcast at all hours of day and night, featuring a cast of uncountable thousands. They had their favorites. Saul loved a show whose title card he could not read but whose rhythm he felt by intuition: hard-wearing men, thin as whipping-switches, prowling the desert with gleaming revolvers at their hips. Mei loved football, a game she found as satisfying as it was inscrutable. She liked that it was at once fast and slow, its economy of motion. She liked the rules she had inferred for herself—the careful gatherings and their slow transposition up and down the field, the score ticking up now and again. And most of all she liked how on that temperamental black-and-white screen, all the players became black blots beneath a white sky, tracing arcane patterns upon the gray grass.

The television came to be a great comfort for the family as they wandered through those early days of lack. Indeed for many years even their triumphs were only ever the recovered substance of their former lives, never new conquests. One day Saul found a dollar on the sidewalk and used it to bring home a single bar of chocolate, something neither he nor his wife had tasted in years, and he had placed it on the kitchen counter with such pride that a fussy Mara even stopped crying to see what was going on. Mei broke it into a thousand pieces and allowed the family to eat the chocolate, one fragment at a time, over the following week, so that its taste might last and be properly savored for as long as possible. And she fed some to her daughter, tucking shards into her lip to melt so Mara would not choke, because she felt a mother’s purpose was to show her child everything in creation that was sweet and good, and she did not know when they might have money enough for chocolate again.

When Mara was eighteen months old, a heat wave settled in over the valley so thick that in some places cattle died where they stood. The power and phone lines feeding the ranch sagged in the heat, their rubberized sheaths softening to gum. On the evening of the third day of the spell, when the power cable hovered six inches above the ground, it was investigated by a curious, electrically conductive, and deeply unlucky marmot. With a brief and almighty buzz, the creature was evaporated and in that same instant everything in the house stilled. When, one week later, their power was restored, Saul and Mei found that their television ritual no longer worked. No amount of antenna-fiddling could produce any shapes even half-recognizably human upon the screen. Finally, Saul took a ladder up to the roof and wrapped the rooster wind vane in half a spool of copper wire. He ran the rest of it off the shingles, alongside the gutters for a full six laps around the house, then through a gap under the side door that let in thin snowdrifts in the winters, down two hallways clinging to the crown molding, and finally through the listing doorframe separating the kitchen from the living room. There, the quarter-mile braid of copper ended in a fat lump of solder joining it in perpetuity to the television’s broken antenna. The fix took him the better part of a weekend working in the heat, but its effects were immediate and transformative: unaccountably, the television picture became full color afterward.

An unexpected consequence of the whole-house antenna was that certain corners in certain rooms became ambient shortwave radios. Mei could listen to the morning news coming muffled out of the kitchen pantry as she fixed breakfast. And Saul, to his great displeasure, discovered that his favored reading nook in the living room had been colonized by a Christian radio station whose tinny proselytizing drove him to seek some quiet with his flowers in the dark, north-facing spare room of the house where he had moved them after Mara’s arrival; the sunlit room where he had revived them had become the nursery. Most remarkably, when Mara was not quite two years old, Mei realized that her daughter’s unintelligible babbling was in fact rudimentary French, spoken by no one for miles in any direction. Only much later was it discovered that, by sheer coincidence, the random windings of Saul’s homemade antenna had approximated a parabolic receiver to such an extent that the nursery picked up errant Quebecois signals during especially cold nights, so that young Mara slept cocooned in the soft rustlings of a language whispered by the bedsprings beneath her and the folded tin animals of the mobile hanging above her. By then she was already beginning to form indelible memories of sight and sound. Even to her last breath she would remember the clinking of the tin lions against the tin tigers, the winding and unwinding of the wires, the huge walls echoing with words she could only partly understand. In her old age, Mara would find the mobile again, stashed away in a box behind dozens of identical boxes that filled an entire shed, and as she ran her fingers over the metal edges of the animals, she would be struck by how small they had become, and how delicate, and how very unlike real lions and tigers and bears they were.

On the morning of Mara’s second birthday, long before the sky began to lighten, Saul caught one of the four black cockerels that had hatched in the spring, whispered an apology over its small and frightened head, and cut its throat. The blade in his hands moved quickly and surely and the bird thrashed twice and was still. He had become much better at killing chickens since his first, disastrous attempt.

In truth they had never planned on eating their chickens—they only had five at first, anyway, and one of those was a vicious old rooster. Then three new chicks hatched in the spring after their first winter. Their sudden appearance proved two things: the first, that the old rooster might be good for something after all, and the second, that Mei’s reading of the land might have been truer, for by then Saul’s chrysanthemums were already lying shriveled and frost-bleached in the fields.

Mei was ravenous almost all the time back then, with Mara growing in her belly. When those new chicks shed their down and sprouted feathers and combs, revealing themselves as two hens and a cockerel, Mei began to speak longingly of chicken soup. So, naively, Saul offered to butcher and stew the old rooster to make room for the new one. But he was squeamish and inexperienced, and it had been a nightmare. The bird weighed nearly ten pounds and had spurs the length of a man’s thumb, and after Saul failed to properly wring its neck, it had wandered around for two days with its head draped at an angle, crowing thinly through its mangled voice box at odd hours of the night, pecking its limp head uselessly at the ground.

Finally, on the third day of the bird’s half-life, Mei took charge, refusing to delay her chicken dinner another evening. She went stomping barefoot down to the chicken coop with the kitchen cleaver in her fist, her maternity dress billowing behind her, swearing to high heaven that she’d finish what Saul started because she was starving, by god, and all the while she wore a grimace of such frightful intensity and privation that Saul almost laughed. She cornered the wretched thing in the coop, brought it to the butchering shed, tied it up by its feet, and lopped its head clean off. Saul half expected to see naught but bile pouring out of the bird, so mean and ornery had he been in life. As the last drops of blood ran out of its gravity-straightened neck, clearing the rooster’s choked throat, it made a deathly croak so loud and haunting that it sent all the other chickens squawking into their roost, where they packed together in frightened puffs of feathers and combs. They stayed shut up in there for an entire week, during which time the hens laid no eggs, the young rooster made no sound, and Saul resolved to do better by the poor creatures in the future so as to spare them from Mei’s cleaver.

When the chickens at last resumed normal living, Mei remarked off-handedly over dinner that the birds must have finished their mourning, and Saul remembered how strange and beautiful he found this thought, that such lowly birds might yet feel the peculiar mixture of grief and grace that seemed to perfuse his life, and which would come to define it.

And on that bracing winter morning of Mara’s second birthday, that feeling struck him once more. Mara’s birthday cockerel swung gently from its feet, steam rising from its opened gullet in the frigid air. Saul found himself unnerved by the whole tableau, the blade in his hand, the darkness of blood on the ground already clotting to ice, the late sunrise breaking over the distant hills. He lifted the chicken into the shallow sunlight and watched its blue-black feathers tremble as a gentle breeze passed over the land. His mind began to drift with the snow and the earth and the huge sound of the sky. The steam curling from the throat of the bird was a substance identical to the steam which his own breath pushed into the world. He sheathed the knife and tugged a sickle feather from the bird’s tail, ran his thumb down its vanes. It made a dusty and primitive sound that reminded him of scythes swinging through grain, the sound of his father carving a harvest from the millet fields. When he was a little boy and his sister, Ying, was still alive, the two of them would spend their afternoons playing in the antechamber, their ears pricked for their father’s heavy footfalls, their minds hovering just beyond the threshold as they awaited his return.

Once, when Saul was thirteen and Ying six, they had waited for their father for hours after he should have arrived. As the light angled to darkness Ying grew more and more anxious, twisting her hair into tortured braids as she waited, and it fell to Saul to comfort her, even though he was also frightened. What if he’s been killed, Ying said, her voice scarcely a whisper, what if he’s dead and he’s lying in the field and he’ll never come home. Saul saw it as she said it, pictured their father’s body sprawled over the chaff, cooling in the wind, and only after swallowing hard was he able to speak in a steady voice, convincingly calm, don’t be silly, little sister, he hasn’t died. What could kill Baba?

But when their mother returned in the