Katherine Jin has made the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Habits.

The winner of the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and have the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on April 22 and the winner will be announced on April 29.

Katherine Jin is a writer living in New York City. She holds a degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo.

"Parents fight, then eat mandarins."

"There were three themes I wanted to explore in my story. One, how achieving the success you desperately wished for can be bittersweet. Two, the way people can be harsher on themselves and on people close to them than on strangers. Finally, the heartbreak of watching your parents age in real-time. I know I have yet to face the most difficult challenges of adulthood, but nothing could have prepared me for the terror of watching the years pile onto my parents' faces, and the horror of knowing there's no going back."

At the age of 54, my dad left his job to become a taxi driver. My mom and I watched as he abandoned his career in engineering and returned to the first job he held in this country, when the air felt unfamiliar and the language impenetrable. I wasn't in Canada at the time, and never witnessed the hunger and grit of my parents' early days here, which they rarely talked about.

All I know is, after my parents earned their master's degrees in electrical engineering, they drove into offices every morning to design microchips smaller than fingernails. They were on teams of engineers creating tiny circuits they'd never touch or see in real life, and although the diagrams they emailed to company headquarters weren't tangible, the material benefits blossomed like flowers. My dad stopped driving taxis. My mom left the lens factory. They began work at the microchip company, where people learned to spell and pronounce their names. The microchip job became the financial and legal basis of my immigration to Canada.

The winner of the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2021 CBC Poetry Prize is open for submissions until May 31, 2021. The 2022 CBC Short Story Prize will open in September and the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January 2022.