Ng “has acted with the generosity of a patron saint,” says R.O. Kwon, author of “The Incendiaries.” The two writers met at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College, in Vermont, in 2009. She “read my book early and blurbed it, which I know is a significant favor to ask of anyone,” Kwon said.

“I haven’t surveyed exactly who she’s blurbed,” Kwon continued, “but I have especially noticed her name on the books of Asian-American women who are coming out with their first books. And that just seems like a very intentionally generous thing that she’s doing.”

Ng’s strategic benevolence is aimed at promoting her peers, of course, but also at fixing skewed, reductive notions of representation.

“One of my longstanding irritations with the way that we view the world,” she said, “is like, who’s going to be the next Jhumpa Lahiri? Who’s going to be the next Amy Tan? Like there can only be one, and you can only get there by dethroning the person who’s at the top.”

“I definitely don’t want to be the single story of the young, Asian-American woman writer,” she added. “There are lots of other Asian women, even Chinese-American women, who are doing all kinds of stuff that I’m not doing.”

Ng said that her drive to share her good fortune with her peers comes from her own early career uncertainties. “I know something about what it’s like to be an Asian-American woman who’s trying to get her voice out there with a debut novel,” she said. “It can be a hard sell.”