Paula Yoo

My favorite book, growing up, was E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. I first read that book in the first grade, and it had a huge impact on my life because I didn’t even finish dinner. I had to read every single page of that book. And at the end, I instantly knew what I wanted to be. I was inspired by Charlotte, the spider, and I realized I have to be a writer. So, I would take pieces of paper and fold them in half and staple them and write book cover titles and then chapter one, and I would just write these books.

I’ve written hundreds of books, and one day they’ll all be published. And in the back I used to draw a little picture of myself with my glasses because I’ve been wearing glasses since I was a kid, and I would write “Paula Yoo, age six, is an elementary school student,” you know, “in Manchester, Connecticut, and this is her first book. Her next book” – and I would even write the title, you know, saying will come out next year.

So, and what happened was by the second grade I ended up writing my first real novel. It was 75 pages long, and I sent it in to Harper & Row because they published a lot of the books that I read as well. Harper & Row would later become Harper Collins. So, I sent it off, and I get a really nice letter back from Harper & Row, and they said “Paula, you’re a really talented child writer. You should send in a story. We have a children’s writer short-story contest for kids ages 7 to 10.”

And I immediately ripped up the letter in front of my parents, and I started crying. And they’re like what’s wrong, that’s a great letter, and I said I’m not a child writer; I’m a real writer. And I did not know that it would be almost three decades until Harper & Row would become Harper Collins and then they would publish my first novel Good Enough. [laughs] So, I think the lesson there was I learned at a very young age that rejection is hard, and you can’t give up as a writer.

And I think the other thing I did as a kid was, I play violin. So, I would also practice. So, when I was not reading or writing, I was practicing the violin, and today I’m writing and when I’m not writing, I read, and when I’m not reading, I still play the violin. So, I really haven’t changed at all in the past how many decades.

I’m Korean American. I was born in America, and I actually did live in Korea for a few years. I was born in Virginia, and I grew up mostly in Connecticut on the East Coast. And I lived in Korea from 1977 to ’82, and I went to Seoul Foreign School, which was a school for American kids. And it was really interesting because growing up as a Korean American in a mostly white suburban town in Connecticut, I got, unfortunately, I got, you know, the slanted eye thing, kids calling me terrible racist slurs, and I used to get a lot of “Can you see when you’re smiling?” kind of questions, which made me very self-conscious about my eyes.

And it was interesting because when we moved to Seoul, Korea, suddenly I was surrounded by everyone who looked like me, but because I talked the way I talk and I don’t speak Korean – I was raised to speak English and I’m very American, the way I behaved and my body language, the way I talked, and I spoke very little Korean – I was trying to learn it as a kid – the Korean kids who looked just like me, they made fun of me too, and they didn’t consider me Korean.

And I would find out later there’s a Korean term called “gyopo” which means Koreans who are not born in Korea, and it can sometimes be a little bit of a problematic term because you’re not really considered really Korean. So, I kind of grew up not fitting into either world. I didn’t fit in in my country of heritage, and I didn’t fit in in my other country of heritage. [laughs]

You know, I saw myself in a lot of books whether or not they had Asian characters. It didn’t matter if the character was black, Latinx. It didn’t matter who the character was; there was always a universal connection I had, you know. I’m not a white girl who grew up on a farm in the countryside, but I identified with Fern’s sense of compassion and her sense of adventure and wanting to protect those who are helpless.

I identified with that and found that very important. That speaks to the core of my own personality. And it was the same with all the other books that I read. So, that’s, again, why I think representation is important because everyone doesn’t have to look like me in order for me to understand main themes in literature and character arcs and emotional journeys. But because I don’t see people who look like me, it tends to, I think, develop a subconscious bias where you start to think that people like me, we don’t matter. We’re not unique, you know, our experiences aren’t important, and that’s a dangerous thing.

In terms of actually seeing Asian American characters, I think I was a little too old by the time The Baby-Sitters Club had become popular, but I remember noticing, you know, Claudia Kishi, and she was Japanese American, but I remember thinking oh, there’s a girl who looks like me on the cover. I remember actually it wasn’t until my twenties, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club – I’m not Chinese American, I didn’t grow up in San Francisco, but there were a lot of Asian American issues in that book that I was like oh, this is cool. And I remember seeing the movie, and I did not know that it would be 25 years until Crazy Rich Asians before we saw another major Hollywood movie with an all-Asian, Asian American cast with a family and all of that.

So, I found that a little discouraging, but I remember going to see The Joy Luck Club and thinking okay, I’m not Chinese, but it’s just kind of cool to see people, you know, who look like me and talk like me. And, in fact, I think there’s a character who doesn’t speak Mandarin, you know. She’s like me, she speaks total American. So, I thought that was very important to me.

I think also Chang-rae Lee, who was a famous adult Korean American novelist, his books really spoke to me as well. It was like oh, you know, our stories do matter. He’s being published by a major publisher. He’s winning all these awards. That’s really cool.

So, I would say my seeing people who looked like me or people who were actually of Korean descent, that happened much later in life, and there was a lot of catch-up. I had to kind of do my own independent Asian American studies course, if you will. You know, I would go to that tiny little Asian bookshelf at Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore, and I just would pull out every single book that I could, just going okay, you know, I don’t know this person, I don’t know this piece of history, I want to read all about it.

When I wrote my three children’s book picture book biographies, Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds, the Sammy Lee Story; Shining Star, the Anna May Wong Story; and Twenty-two Cents, Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, I chose those three people because of their resilience.

Sammy Lee faced great racism. He was not allowed to swim in the town public swimming pool because he wasn’t white, you know, and this is in Pasadena. Do you know how hot Pasadena gets in the summer? It’s three digits. It’s like a hundred degrees out there. This child needs relief from the hot heatwaves, the sun, and he has to be behind a fence. He can’t use the pool ’cause he’s not white. That’s unforgivable. That’s disgusting. It’s hateful. It’s wrong.

What did he do? Ended up becoming a doctor, ended up winning two, not just one, two gold medals for America at the Olympics in diving. You know, that’s resilience. That’s saying I see the best in my country, and I’m going to go towards that, you know, I’m not going to let the hate defeat my dreams. With Anna May Wong, same thing, faced great racism as an actress, you know, did not get a lot of roles because she was not white, you know, had to do stereotype roles like “Mongol slave number four.”

She was hashtag representation matters decades before Twitter and social media even came about.

It’s amazing how she overcame the racism in Hollywood to fight for more dignified roles in Hollywood. And it’s because of Anna May Wong that we have things like the blockbuster megahit Shang-Chi from Marvel, you know, why we have Crazy Rich Asians, why we have Parasite and Minari, two Korean and Korean-American movies back to back at the Oscars.

You know, we owe a lot of that fight in Hollywood because she fought for the importance of positive imagery on the screen. That’s resilience. She didn’t give up. She kept going to those auditions even though she knew she probably would not get the role. Muhammad Yunus grew up, he came from a well-off family, but they were surrounded by poverty, and he watched his mother, they were making a favorite family snack, she would give them instead to the kids. He would say all the kids would tell the mom go for it, give it to the poor people outside, the homeless.

And he was so inspired by his mother’s compassion for the homeless and the poverty stricken in Bangladesh, that would lead to him studying economics and coming up with the brilliant idea of using micro banking where you give very small loans to poverty stricken people so they can actually be enabled and empowered to rise above .

You can’t break the cycle of poverty if you’re not given the same level playing field of getting a fair loan to start your business so you can become economically independent. So, he was resilient. He was a Boy Scout. The Boy Scouts taught him about compassion and giving back to the world. So, that is how and why I choose the subjects for my young adult and children’s book biographies.

I always look for people that are resilient and fight back and enact positive change because that, I think, reading about that inspires and empowers young kids to know that you can do something, you know, you can protest, you can talk to your principal about something that is bothering you at your school. You can speak up and protect your friends against bullying, you know, and so forth. So, to me, that’s why I write the biographies that I do, especially for children’s books. I look for kids that are just strong and resilient and fight back.

When I research my books for nonfiction picture book biographies and young adult narrative nonfiction books, I, of course, start off at the library. I do my primary research. I look up any books that were published about the same topic that I’m researching or books about the same person I’m researching. I then go to the archives of newspapers. I go and I try to find out as much information as I can. Now, as a journalist, I also know you don’t want to just stick with the New York Times, you know, the big papers.

For Sammy Lee, started looking up articles in the local Pasadena Weekly papers, you know, was there anything written there, was there anything in the local historical societies, you know, that kind of thing. So, you know, you have to think outside the box even with primary resources, you know, what are other, you know, this person grew up in, you know, where I grew up in Connecticut, let’s look up the Hartford Courant, let’s look up maybe there are local articles because you would be surprised how much – and actually, you shouldn’t be surprised by how much amazing reporting and investigative journalism is done by smaller local newspapers because they have access to certain things other people didn’t.

I then try to interview as many people as I can who are alive. You know, for example, with Muhammad Yunus, I found him. I found his website. I cold emailed the people there, and they said coincidence, he’s going to be in L.A. next month, and I said great, I want to interview him. So, I had the honor of meeting and interviewing him.

In terms of Anna May Wong because she passed away a very long time ago, other research that I did, I watched as many movies of hers as I could. I read movie reviews, I did historical research on how silent movies were made, the transition to talkies, you know, what her life was like in Europe, you know, just looking at press conferences and, you know, any images that I could see of her so I could hear her voice, you know, and what it was like to hear her speak, to get her cadence, to understand how she talked.

And one of the things as a writer is the one thing that keeps me from getting lost in the weeds of my research is always thinking about story and character and heart. So, anything that I highlight, it either has to provide new information that pushes the story forward, that gets you to the next chapter or the next page or provides insight to the main historical subject’s emotional state.

Where were they feeling at this point? You know, how did that get them to the next stage? When Sammy Lee was told you can’t use the swimming pool ’cause you’re not white, what was the information that I found in my research that led to him saying I’m still going to learn how to dive even though I can’t use this swimming pool, you know. And I think that keeps you from falling down the rabbit hole of research ’cause, you know, we can get distracted, you know, where it’s like oh, that’s interesting, and then you’re off.

And you always have to remind yourself no, I am here researching for something very specific. And again, it’s like being a detective. I can’t be distracted. I’m in a room. You know, I’m at the crime site. You know, I can’t be distracted by everything. I’m looking for one thing. I’m looking for a fingerprint that will lead me to the criminal, and that’s what I’m doing with my research. What are the fingerprints that push the story forward that show you the emotional arc of where the character is at the beginning?

Starting my Anna May Wong book where it opens with a fantasy scene where she is tied to the railroad tracks, a train is barreling down at her, and she’s struggling to escape, that was a very risky move because especially for children’s picture book biographies, you have to be very factual, you have to be very true to – authentic and accurate to what happened. I took a little bit of a liberty there. It’s a little bit of a fictionalization.

But I felt the reason why it was necessary was because I write narrative nonfiction. So, the narrative nonfiction that I write is not Anna May Wong was born on, you know, in this year. I have to tell a story. I have to let you know who her character is. So, for Anna May Wong, I realized she wanted to be an actress. She wanted to be in Hollywood. That was her one dream. She was working in this poor Chinese immigrant laundry, and she had the most unglamorous life.

But the one thing that helped her escape this hard, hard childhood life – like today that would be against child labor laws. You can’t have kids working at a laundry like that. She’s eight years old. But I think what helped her escape that was going to the movies whenever she could save up enough money to see those movies and also seeing people film movies in downtown Chinatown in Los Angeles. There were a lot of movies filmed in that area, and she would walk by with her basket of laundry, and she would pause and just watch the movies being made.

And I realized I have to show her imagination because her resilience, her superpower is her imagination, and we need to see her imagining this. And I will say that authentically, nonfiction-wise, and realistically, and to be accurate, she did say in interviews that she would get distracted and practice in front of a mirror fainting and looking scared, and she would always – she loved those Pauline in peril movies, a very popular movie series in the 1920s where, you know, the heroine – you know, the black and white movies.

You’re tied up at the railroad station, you know, the train is coming at you, and then the movie stops. And then you got to go back on Saturday, next Saturday morning to see how does she escape? And she loved those movies. So, to me extrapolating that, even though it was fictional what I did, it was true in real life authentically to what she would say in interviews. So, I can’t imagine her not having a fantasy like that and then pulling back and realizing oh, you’re in a laundry, you’re eight years old, you’re trapped.

And also, I think the topic of Anna May Wong is very cerebral. It’s about fair representation and nonstereotyped, anti-Asian racist images on screen.

That’s a very cerebral kind of inner conflict. So, that’s why I opened the book the way I did ’cause I needed to externalize that inner conflict.

She used her imagination to fight back for Asian-Americans in this country.

My name is Paula Yoo, and I’m going to read from Shining Star, The Anna May Wong Story, published by Lee and Low books and illustrated by Lin Wang. I’m going to read the opening for you. Anna May Wong struggled to free herself. Tight ropes bound her to the railroad tracks. A plume of smoke puffed into the air as a train rumbled toward her.

Stop daydreaming! Startled, Anna May Wong opened her eyes. The train vanished. Steam, not smoke, hissed from a nearby boiler filled with dirty clothes. “Get back to work,” snapped her father. “We have a full day’s worth of laundry to clean and press.” [sighs] Anna May sighed. No longer a damsel in distress in an exciting movie. She was just a nine-year-old girl toiling away at her father’s laundry in Los Angeles’ gritty Chinatown.

Her sisters, Mary and Lulu, scoured clothes with washing powder against scrub boards. Younger brothers, James and Frank, squeezed wet trousers through squeaky cylindrical dryers. Her mother hung up clean dresses to dry on a rod along the ceiling. Picking up a heavy iron from the coal-burning stove, Anna May felt the familiar ache in her arm. She saw the small burn scars that covered her arms. She longed to escape this dreary backbreaking work.

When Anna May finished ironing the shirts, she put them in a basket to lug up the hill to customers’ homes. After she completed her deliveries, Anna May counted five pennies in tips. That was enough to buy a movie ticket for the afternoon matinee. There was nothing Anna May enjoyed more than sneaking way to the cinema. Watching a movie, she could escape from her everyday life, travel to interesting places, and experience new things.

So, that’s a little bit of Shining Star, and as you can see, Anna May Wong would achieve that. She’d become a movie star, and she got to go to interesting new places and meet interesting people and do very exciting things in Hollywood.

Lee and Low editor, Jessica Echeverria recently asked me to be a part of the Confetti Kids series. And it was just starting, and she was telling me about the concept, which is about five kids of all different races and backgrounds living in New York City. And it was about kind of doing like an early reader series, you know, positive adventures with the kids. And I thought it was really sweet, and I said of course I’d love to be involved. I wrote the books Lily’s New Home, Want to Play?, and The Perfect Gift. What’s fun about the books is that each kid has his or her own personality. You know, you have Lily, who’s the new kid on the block. She just moved to New York, and she kind of finds her voice with protesting, and also, she loves to read, she loves to go to the library, you know, she’s just a very active proactive kid. I would say, and Henry is our musician. You know, he can’t get music out of his head.

We have Pablo who is the quiet bookworm, you know. His sisters are too loud. They’re always – he’s like quiet, I’m trying to read. He just loves books. And Mei is a little bit of the artist and a little bit of a writer herself, and I would say Padma, I wonder if she’s a budding chef ’cause, you know, there’s one book where for the block party she wants to bring an Indian dish to the block party, and so she learns a lot about food and stuff like that.

So, it’s very sweet. And what I love about the book too is that all five kids, they’re always there for each other, you know. They play, they care about each other, and I think it’s such a great example of showing kids from all different backgrounds hanging out together. And I think that we celebrate a diverse group of kids that stand in solidarity, telling five and six and seven and eight-year-olds you can all be together on a playground and love each other and care for each other. So, we instill those values early in our children, and that will lead to such great solidarity in the future.

We need diverse books so that we can all connect together, we can all realize that we have a shared universal experience. We need diverse books not just for diverse readers, but for all readers, so we can understand our heritages, our backgrounds, our differences, our similarities, and we can join in solidarity and bridge the gaps between our communities.

As Korean-American, as an Asian-American, I do want to address how librarians and educators and teachers can choose strong book examples about Asian American, Pacific Islander history, literature, fiction, characters, and voices in a way that is equitable and also authentic. I think the only answer I can think of is do the homework and be accountable.

When I say be accountable and do the homework in terms of trying to find the most authentic and proper books to teach that feature Asian American, Pacific Islander characters, themes, and historical events, it’s not just about going to the award list. Oh, what made all the state lists, what made all the awards lists, you know, let me just do that because I was that kind of reader.

Every time the National Book Awards came out or the Pulitzers, I’m like I would just go and get all the books and read them. But that’s not enough. You need to dig beneath that because there are a lot of books that go missing that should have been on those award lists but didn’t have the distribution, you know. Because a lot of these books are being published by more smaller, independent bookstores, they don’t have the access or the money to get them on all the bookshelves at the major bookstores. So that’s one thing.

I also think there are a bunch of websites now that are devoted to helping teachers and librarians know how to just get through this mass of this forest of books, like how do you focus in. There’s We Need Diverse Books.

Linda Sue Park, award-winning Korean American author, she just started a specific resource for Korean and Korean-American and Koreans in the diaspora list of books with interviews and vetting of “here are some really authentic books you should be reading.”

Growing up, there was Korean culture in my family, and I grew up eating kimchi and bulgogi and, you know, all the Korean foods. And, you know, we would play games on New Year’s Eve, the traditional Korea games for certain cultural traditions. 

But for the most part, I’m pretty American. I’m 52 right now, and so my parents were children, they were 8 and 12 years old when the Korean War happened.

So, when they came to America, they wanted to be as American as possible, you know. They did not speak Korean in the household because they wanted me to be American, to assimilate, to speak English. That’s why I don’t speak Korean ’cause I was not taught it. I’m part of a generation where we were trying to erase and assimilate and be part of the culture, and I don’t fault my parents for that because that’s called survival, you know, and that’s the sacrifice our parents and grandparents and our older generation of Asian American Pacific, Islander family members had to do so that we now today can have Asian American studies, that we can protest, that we can do all the stuff that we did.

So, I think that that was part of how I grew up. So, that’s why I don’t speak Korean, and that’s also too why there’s a lot of Korean history and Korean culture that, you know, I’m probably as well-versed as you are. I mean when I do my books, I ask for Korean and Korean American sensitivity readers ’cause I’m like I got to make sure I got this right because I don’t even trust myself. You know, I was given limited resources, so I have to be accountable, and I have to acknowledge that.

We never talked about it, you know. I think with older immigrant parents, no matter what race you are, you know, white immigrant parent, you know, European immigrant parents, you know, African immigrant, like South American, whatever it is, older immigrant parents kind of, they don’t talk, you know, they just want to move on, you know, let’s move on, let’s forget about that history, you know, let’s go to Disneyland, let’s be American. And so yeah, that was stuff that my parents never really talked about, and it was stuff that I found out later.

In fact, my mom never talked about the Korean War. My dad never talked about the Korean War. Every time I asked them about the Korean War, they just shut down. We don’t want to talk about it. My father passed away in 2016, and for the first time my mom started talking about the Korean War, and I was horrified to hear the stories of what she and my dad went through when they were 8 and 12 years old. This was a civil war. Millions of people were killed. I mean the stories she told me, it felt like an Oliver Stone movie. I’m just like oh, I can’t believe you’re telling me this.

And it made me deeply regret not pushing more as a kid, saying Mom, Dad, you have to talk about your past, you have to tell me about this; otherwise, at some point you’re going to leave me, and I’m just going to have to guess and fill in the puzzle pieces ’cause I’m missing pieces of this jigsaw puzzle. And that’s something I really want to emphasize. All young people, no matter what your background is, whoever your family is, whoever your legal guardians are, your parents, whoever are raising you, find out as much as you can about your family.
And if there are things that people don’t want to talk about because it triggers them, it traumatizes them, I understand and respect that, but understand that somehow you have to be a detective about your own family. So yeah, and I think that’s what drives me still to keep writing because I’m like a detective. I’m trying to figure out more about my country of heritage, my upbringing, my Asian-American, my Korean-American family, my Korean family. 

So, I think I’m less of a writer and more of a detective and a witness to just trying to keep this history alive so, you know, we don’t have to keep repeating this pattern of erasure and discrimination.

What was interesting was I went home a few years ago, and I was looking through the boxes in my old childhood home.

And I found a box of my drawings, and what was really disturbing was there’s a lot of pictures of me very young where I draw myself with black hair, black eyes, and I clearly – I know who I identify as Asian American, but then later you start to see this transition where all the pictures start showing me with blonde hair and blue eyes. And then as I got older, the pictures were just me with blonde hair.

I want to state very clearly that I never wanted to be white. It wasn’t that oh, I wish I had blonde hair and blue eyes; it’s just that that’s all I saw, you know, after coming back from Korea, and that’s kind of all I saw.

And because I didn’t fit in in Korea, it made me realize how important representation and diversity and inclusion and equity are important in children’s books because if you don’t see yourself, if you’re erased, you’re kind of forced to start to identify with the majority out there, and I would say that haunted me my whole life. And it kind of makes sense as to why that led to me writing the books that I do and my passion in telling our stories and our history that is missing in children’s literature because I don’t want children to grow up drawing pictures of themselves that don’t look like them.

There has been an increase in bullying against young students in elementary schools and high schools and  junior highs across the country because of the pandemic, specifically for Asian-American, Pacific Islander students. There was a recent survey that came out earlier this year that said that one out of four Asian-American, Pacific Islander teenagers have reported being either verbally or physically harassed and bullied because of the coronavirus specifically because of the pandemic.

And I think had Asian American, Pacific Islander history been taught mandatory in our schools from day one, that number would have been zero today, and that’s why I write these books because we need to get that number to zero, and we need this bullying to stop. The best thing I think teachers can do, aside from obviously making sure their students feel that they are in a safe, protected environment and by stopping immediately anything that they see that is anti-Asian racism, is to educate because you have to educate to stop the hate.

And you have to – you can’t just do one paragraph about the Japanese being illegally incarcerated during World War II or just a quick sentence or here’s a photo of the Chinese laborers from the railroads. We can’t be a paragraph anymore. We have to actually be a course. And three states so far have now issued mandates that Asian-American, Pacific Islander history must be taught in kindergarten through twelfth grade public schools. We have to be humanized. We have to stop erasing our past or erasing our history, erasing our contributions and our voices in this country. 

And I do want to say too very quickly that the AAPI community is going through a little bit of growing pains because we’re a very diverse group of many different countries. Just, you know, just ’cause you’re Chinese may not mean that you identify with someone whose family is from the Philippines. Or if you are, you know, from Pakistan or India or, you know, Korea, like, you know, we have many, many different countries and cultures and languages. So, people also have to understand how rich and diverse the Asian-American, the Asian diaspora is as well. That’s a big thing that we also have to acknowledge.

One of the biggest controversies right now, especially for white writers and people who are not of the race that they want to write about, there’s a lot of talk about the hashtag own voices, which was originally about, you know, you’re Asian-American so you get to write a book about Asian-American history or whatever it is because it’s your own voice.

You know, you’re not a white author trying to write about Asian-American culture. You get to do it. That’s authentic. And then that scares a lot of non‑Asian writers who say “Can I never write about this? You know, I thought writing was using your imagination. We can be anything. We can do whatever we want.” And yes, I do believe that as a writer, you do have the freedom. Write whatever you want. You can write whatever you want. You can write about who you want. You can write about what point of view you want to write about. You have that freedom as a writer.

It’s not about freedom; it’s about responsibility. Should you? Why, as a non-Asian, do you want to write about this topic in history? What do you have that makes you the perfect writer for this topic? Now to give you an example, there are many famous writers, you know, even Pearl S. Buck, she was born and raised in China. She grew up there.

But at the end of the day, she’s white so she will not face the prejudices and the racism that a person of Chinese descent will. She has had certain privilege. She cannot walk in those shoes. So, you have to make sure that your privilege is authenticated and checked by sensitivity readers because there could be something that you may have missed. That is why we had a sensitivity reader for a lot of my books that are based on Chinese-American and Chinese subjects, especially with Vincent Chin because I’m not Chinese. I’m Korean-American. I grew up in Connecticut.

So, the fact that even I, as an Asian-American, doing own voices, still am accountable and taking in, you know, and saying I have to be responsible, if I can do that, so can other readers and so can other librarians and teachers. So, when you find a book that is a novel or a nonfiction book about an Asian-American, Pacific Islander event or a theme or fiction novel, you are accountable, and it’s your homework to go research as much as you can about that author, you know. If they’re not Asian, really find out, you know, why them? And why not this other author? We should be excited because now people are getting the chance to tell their own stories, and there have been beautifully responsible, authentic books written by non‑Asians that have been published that passed the test, but it’s time for us to also start doing that. We need those opportunities as well. And it’s not just about diversity. It’s also about equity. It’s about leveling the playing field.

Growing up, not only did I want to be a writer, but I also wanted to be a journalist because I was basically really into the news. You know, as a kid, I would sit and watch the national news broadcast with Dan Rather with my mom and dad. I was very into news. I would read the Hartford Courant. I was one of those kids that I actually read the newspaper, not just the funnies section, not just the cartoons. I read the front page. And in high school, I ended up being the high school editor of my school newspaper. And then in college, I was an editor for the Yale Herald.

So, I ended up going to Columbia Journalism School and got my master’s in journalism, which led directly to being a reporter for the Seattle Times and then the Detroit News and then People Magazine in Los Angeles, which is where I live today. And what happened was – this is now 2002 – a friend of mine, who was a TV writer, she said to me you watch so much TV and you’re such a TV junkie, you know, you watch all this stuff, I can’t believe you’re not writing TV scripts and movie scripts because TV and movies are basically fiction journalism. You’re writing fiction on a very tight deadline. I think you’d be good at that.

So, I found out about the Warner Bros. workshop, which was a six-week program that taught you how to write TV scripts, and my friend had graduated from that program. So, I thought oh, maybe I’ll just send in a script. And I actually did it for fun. And at the end of the Warner Brothers workshop, I got signed to an agency, and I got my first job as a staff writer for the fourth season of The West Wing. I got to work with Aaron Sorkin and everybody during that.

I worked on Supergirl. I worked on Eureka and Defiance on Syfy, did a little bit of science fiction writing. I play the violin so obviously I get hired on Mozart in the Jungle, and the last show I wrote for was a Pretty Little Liars spinoff called The Perfectionists, and I currently am working on movie scripts and TV pilots right now at home.

To answer your question about how TV and journalism have helped my books, I will say, first of all, learning how to write on deadline. You got to hit those deadlines, you know, and writing is not precious to me anymore because in journalism, the editor, the red line just cuts out. We don’t need this. You’re being too precious here. We need this information. You learn to write very efficiently on time and to always get to the heart of the matter in journalism. Journalism also taught me about research, not just looking up stuff on Google or going to the library and checking out a book or primary sources.

All of that is important, but journalism taught me about boots on the ground. You go and you cold-knock on that person’s door. You get a live interview. Even if you end up not using quotes from the live interview that you did, you still get to see the person’s mannerisms, you still get to see who they are as a person and their behaviorisms, and you get a sense of who they are at their heart, and that’s very important. So, when I started writing my nonfiction books for children, it wasn’t just primary research in terms of books and going through newspaper archives. I was actually going to meet people.

For Twenty-two Cents: Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, I ended up interviewing Dr. Muhammad Yunus in person. You know, he’s the man who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. So, on top of interviewing people, you also have this awesome opportunity to meet. I met a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize. How cool is that? So, that’s also how my journalism training helped me with my books. 

And as a TV writer and movie writer, it’s all about structure. You can’t have people turning the channel during the commercials. You have to have exciting act breaks, cliffhangers. And that also taught me how to write books. When you read my book on Vincent Chin, when you turn the pages of my Sammy Lee picture book from Lee and Low, you don’t want to put the book down and go eat dinner, just like me with Charlotte’s Web. No, I’m not hungry, Mom. I have to read one more chapter. So, I think TV and movie writing helped me learn how to write a compelling book where, you know, the story just, you know, you have to keep turning the page.