Bonnie Tsui was born in Queens, New York, and raised on Long Island. As her parents met in a swimming pool in Hong Kong, it seemed fitting that she and her brother should then prepare for competitive swimming careers, which lasted a decade. She attended Harvard University, where she rowed crew, snowboarded, and graduated magna cum laude in English and American Literature and Language. She also lived in Australia, studying at the University of Sydney and writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, and won a Radcliffe Traveling Fellowship to New Zealand.
In 2009, her book American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods was published by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press; it won the 2009-2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009 Notable Bay Area Books selection. She is the recipient of the Jane Rainie Opel Young Alumna Award at Harvard University. In 2017, she was awarded the Karola Saekel Craib Excellence in Food Journalism Fellowship by Les Dames d’Escoffier. She also received a 2019 National Press Foundation Fellowship and a 2010 and 2021 Mesa Refuge writing residency, and was selected for the 2021 Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellowship. In 2023, she won a Lowell Thomas Gold Award for her Afar magazine essay about Chinatowns as both scapegoat and sanctuary; this story was also featured in a list of notable essays and literary nonfiction in The Best American Essays 2023.
A longtime contributor to The New York Times, Bonnie has also performed numerous times at Pop-Up Magazine and other live storytelling events. She helped to launch F&B: Voices from the Kitchen, a storytelling project from La Cocina that shares stories from cooks and kitchens that are less often heard. She also appeared as a talking head in the documentary The Search for General Tso, to explain the curiously foreign-yet-familiar quality of Chinese-American food, and was featured in the History Channel series “America: Promised Land.” She is a consultant on the forthcoming Hulu television series adaptation of Charles Yu’s novel Interior Chinatown, premiering November 19, 2024.
Bonnie lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. In 2020, her bestselling book Why We Swim was published by Algonquin Books; it received praise from The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, Booklist, Kirkus, and more, and was an NPR Best Book of the Year and one of TIME magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. It has been translated into ten languages. In 2021, Bonnie’s debut children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave, about big-wave women surfers, was published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers/Macmillan. Her new book, On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, will be published April 22, 2025, and signed copies are available for preorder now.
She also hopes, as Oliver Sacks writes in “Water Babies,” to “swim till I die.”