Asian Pacific American History Month

I feel like it’s important for young readers to see themselves in books, but also to see others in books. You know there’s a lot of talk about books being mirrors and windows and I definitely believe that. Our society is multicultural. There’s so many different backgrounds of every kind, different abilities, different thought processes.

The value in seeing yourself is understanding that there is not necessarily an ideal that you need to look toward, but to know that you’re already ideal as you are. But also whenever you read about people who are outside of your experience the ability to build empathy and understanding of where other people come from and what other people are experiencing, because we all live in these bubbles, right, and it’s important for us to be able to peek inside someone else’s bubble if we can, because that’s how we become a more compassionate society.

And you know there’s a lot of studies that show readers tend to be more empathetic and that books help build empathy. And I mean what’s more important than that.

The first time I recall seeing an Asian character in a book was again Judy Blume. She had a book Just as Long as We’re Together and one of the characters, she wasn’t the main character, but she was one of the three best friends and she was an Asian character.

And I remember being fascinated by that because it wasn’t something that I had come across before. And, you know, another thing I like to tell young people is when I was growing up all the stories that I wrote for myself all had White girl characters and a lot of times they had blonde hair or they certainly weren’t a part of any marginalized community.

And one of the great things about this year’s Newbery honorees is that they’re all people of color. And the great thing is that young people today more and more will be able to see themselves in books and whenever they sit down to write when they’re eight years old like I was they’ll write characters that look like them because they’ll know that their stories are valid.

It never even occurred to me, even into adulthood to have a story with a Filipino character until I wrote Blackbird Fly, which was my first book. And that’s really sad, you know when you think about it. So I’m happy to be writing at a time right now where there’s more and more of those stories available so that people know that their stories are valuable and that they need to be heard.

A lot of my books are inspired by my mother. And she is from the Philippines and she loves to tell stories. She’s a very devout Catholic, so I grew up listening to a lot of stories about saints. And she would share these stories with such passion and an underlying morality of course and life lessons that they had offered and that very much informed specifically Hello Universe a character of Lola, the grandmother, and her use of folktales to impart her wisdom on Virgil.

And in my other books as well it’s very much mirroring my growing up and hearing, you know, I don’t speak Tagalog or any of the dialects, but of course I grew up hearing words peppered here and there. And so that’s incorporated in the books and also things of food, which is integral to any culture, also prevalent in the books. So, you know, it’s very much a reflection of the things I heard, felt, saw growing up.

I actually went to Manila for the readers and writers festival and it was my first trip back to the Philippines since my first book Blackbird Fly was published in 2015 and I was able to visit schools in Manila. And there’s this sense of nervousness at first because I’ve spoken to kids all across America and I’ve heard from Filipino American families, parents, readers, and it’s been really overwhelming. But there’s always that question I wonder how Filipinos will react or embrace books or relate.

And one thing that I’ve absolutely learned as a writer is that when you’re writing about real life, real emotions, feelings of loneliness, not fitting in and otherness, pretty much anyone can relate to, at least you hope they do, and it seems as if they do, because no matter the background we’ve all experienced what that’s like.

So I went to Manila and I spoke to the schools there. Of course everyone was excited and enthusiastic and so appreciative of Filipinos being depicted in literature and celebrating Filipino American culture.

Within Green Lantern: Legacy there is an immigrant and refugee story in there because the main character, the grandmother, had a refugee experience. And for me it was an opportunity to kind of revisit the narrative around refugees and immigrants because to me there is, there are very few instances that are, that show a greater heroism than, than the refugee experience. I know that personally from my family, you don’t have to look very far to see examples of true heroism because they went through these unimaginable circumstances, right? And they emerged on the other side. 

As a kid growing up, it’s like you can have all your problems, but then I’d always be like, but anything that I’m facing right now is nothing, pales in comparison to what my, my family had gone through. So, when I was thinking about this story it was like there’s this young kid who has a challenge of becoming a superhero himself, but within his family he has this example of heroism that he can, can look to.

Is that something you’re going to draw strength from or is that something that you’re going to turn away from?

When I was writing this story it felt very natural. A lot of people asked me when I was writing, they said like, ‘Is it strange to write a superhero story for kids?’ And for me I was like it’s the opposite. It feels like the most natural thing in the world because in the origin story is almost exactly the same and follows the same beats as a coming-of-age story. 

You know, you’re trying to figure out how you fit in with the world, how you use your new-found powers to navigate the, the spaces around you. So it was, it was a great opportunity. And the refugee story in the book comes full circle because that was something that I learned about my grandmother after she passed away

I was at her services, and I had just delivered a eulogy for her, and this family came up, and they said, ‘You know, when we came to this country your grandmother showed up to our door with bags of food and like ingredients and chopsticks, and things from Vietnam that we couldn’t find. And she very much like gave us the opportunity to kind of settle her.’ And she was very much about paying it forward in that way. 

For me I feel like in the Vietnamese experience immigration, the refugee experience is something that’s historical or in the past, but there are so many people that are living that experience now, and I wanted to just kind of show that an example of heroism would be to, to be there for people when they, when they need it. So that was something that I thought was very important for me to have the opportunity to kind of pay tribute to that style and that kind of heroism that doesn’t always get the same kind of shine as other superhero attributes.

It’s been a wonderful experience to talk to children and have them talk about how they see themselves reflected in books that I’ve worked on. For me, as an author these books weren’t around when I was a kid. So, I didn’t see myself in a book truly until after I graduated from college. I read Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese and I had this like, everything clicked into place. I was like I didn’t know that this was what I was missing until I read this book, that this was even possible to see yourself in this way on the page. 

So, when I talk to children now and they’re seeing themselves through these books, and I’m so grateful that they don’t have to wait as long as I did. But even just this weekend I was at Comic Con and people would come up and say, they held up Green Lantern: Legacy and they were like, ‘You wrote about my grandmother. You wrote about my family.’ And that means so much. And with Drawn Together I’m always getting messages from families who see their experience reflected on the page in a way that they hadn’t before, and that means the world to me.

Drawn Together is a very special book for, for me. And it came based on my experience with my own family. My family is originally from Vietnam, but I was born in the U.S. And growing up, my grandparents spoke mostly Vietnamese and I spoke mostly English, so I spent a lot of time at their house, in their home, and we loved each other so much, and yet we didn’t know how to talk to each other about that. 

So I grew up with this dissonance of both feeling very close to my grandparents, but also feeling very distant at the same time because we didn’t know how to communicate on a very basic level. I wanted to write a book that both captured that depth of love and connection while also recognizing some of the challenges that could come with it. 

What I didn’t know at the time is that Dan had the same experience with his grandmother because she lived in Thailand and spoke mostly Thai, or maybe exclusively Thai, and so he had that same language barrier, and had to find ways to try and connect with her over time. 

So that story is very personal to me. And it’s been wonderful to share with people because, as a writer, and all till – until this book came out pretty much, that inability to communicate felt like this personal failure and burden that I was carrying, but having the book out in the world has given me the opportunity to connect with other people who have had similar experiences because I’ll go to a reading and then inevitably afterwards someone will come up and say, ‘Oh you know, this reminds me so much of my childhood.’ Or, ‘I speak English with my grandparents, but we’re not able to connect just because we can’t find that common ground until we were able to find a mutual love of cooking or music or art.’ 

And so having a book out in the world like that has made me feel less alone. And what’s even more gratifying for me is this is a book about the inability to connect with someone in your life and then seeing classrooms and families use the book as a way of connecting with the people in their lives. 

I’ve had so many people reach out and say, you know, ‘We read this book and we immediately called our grandparents.’ Or ‘We immediately decided we needed to get together with our grandmother who we haven’t talked to in a long time.’ And I’ll get pictures of kids and their grandparents drawing together or painting together. And the fact that this book, which was born out of that distance, is being used to close that gap for other families means the world to me. And I can’t think of a better tribute to my grandparents than, than that.

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]

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.

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.

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.”

My very first book, The Ugly Vegetables, is a story about a girl and her mother. Her mother grows Chinese vegetables in her garden while everybody else in the neighborhood grows flowers. And the little girl is very embarrassed because they’re obviously Chinese-American or Asian-American in the story. This is very much based on my childhood. I think one of the things when I wrote my first story was to write what you know. Following those old mantras, write what you know.

After I wrote this book, it was actually a relative success. I was really, really proud of it. But what happened was I started getting letters, or parents who say “Oh I’ve been looking so hard for a book just like this. An Asian-American character where there is somebody who looks just like my daughter. Or just like my son.” Then I started thinking about myself, and I started thinking about how I grew up. I remembered how I used to feel very much alone because I grew up in upstate New York where there was not a lot of Asians, the fact we were the only Asian family in our neighborhood, I was definitely the only Asian girl in my classroom. Most of the time I just forgot about it, most of the time I just pretended I wasn’t Asian. In fact I remember walking past a window and I would see my reflection in the window and I would go “Oh, there’s a Chinese girl.” I’d be like “Oh wait, that’s me.”

Because most of the time I would just forget that I was Asian. So, I think one of the reasons I did that was because I loved books when I was younger. And all the books that I read never had anybody that looked like me in them. And I realized that if that had been maybe I wouldn’t have felt so alone. I wouldn’t have wanted to forget I was Asian so much. And so that’s something that is a mirror, these books are very much a mirror of my life when I was younger.

And as a window, I hope as a window, when I was younger, I tell this story quite often. As I said, I always tried to pretend that I wasn’t Asian, I’d always try to forget that I was Asian. Most of the time that worked. Most of the time, I just forget that I was. I thought I was just like everybody in my classroom. And then my fifth grade class decided to put on the play “The Wizard of Oz”. And everybody, all the girls in my class wanted to be Dorothy. And I really wanted to be Dorothy too. So, every day, out on the school-yard, we’d all sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow” over and over and over practicing for the audition.

Finally on the day of the audition. We are standing in that circle, one last time, practicing. And I turned to the girl next to me and I said “Hey today’s the audition, do you think they might choose me to be Dorothy” And she looked at me and she said “But you can’t be Dorothy. Dorothy’s not Chinese.” And I remembered I felt so stupid. And I remember feeling like oh my gosh she’s right, I’m Asian, I’m Chinese. There’s no way I could ever be Dorothy. And when it was time for the audition and they called me name, I didn’t even try out. I just shook my head and said “No, no, no. Forget it. It would be so stupid for Dorothy to be Chinese.”

So my hope for my books is not only is it a mirror of my childhood so that kids who were like me could see themselves and not feel so alone. I also hope that it’s a window for those who are not Asian who are not of a minority race. And they can see other, other races and realize oh they are just like, just like, even though they might look different. So that’s kind of how I feel my books are both windows and mirrors.

I guess what I’ve been thinking about lately is about kind of gaps I history, and as an Asian-American, you don’t always feel like you’re part of it. You don’t feel like you’re part of that history, but there are tremendous roles that Asian-Americans have played at different points in history, and I would say that you should challenge your students to look for the gaps and to look for the empty spaces, and they might be surprised at what they find.

It wasn’t until I was grown and had children of my own that I realized, “Oh, there’s probably just a treasure trove of stories in my own family that I’ve never looked into.”

Some young people may come to that much sooner than I did, and they may well be interested in, “Grandma,” or, “Grandpa, tell me about when you were young.” “How was it different in whatever country you lived in?” And if that’s the case, wonderful. Write them down. Oftentimes, it’s grandma and grandpa, or even your parents who can’t write in English, or can’t speak in English, and can’t share those stories in the way that you can. You can help, even if it’s only writing down a story or two of your grandparents that you then just show to the rest of your family.

So Tracy Woo in Blubber was the first character that I really saw myself in when I was growing up because finally instead of Mr. Sulu or, you know, Bruce Lee, I actually saw a character who was my generation and who had very similar experiences to mine, and I think it filled a need I didn’t even know I had to see myself there.

So I had had my third child. I’d been a stay-at-home mom, and, like, I had gotten an invitation to a high school reunion, and, you know, you get those things and it kinda makes you stop and think, and for that one, I thought, “You know, what have I not done that I always wanted to do?” And I realized I always wanted to write — try to write a children’s book, and so I called up a friend of mine who had an MFA, and I said, “Well, you know, what should I do?” And she said, “Go to the Writers Center in Maryland. They have, you know, great programs,” and so I took my first class with Mary Quattlebaum, who’s a really awesome teacher, and it just kinda took off from there.

I think, you know, the hard part about being a mom when you’re a writer is you kind of sometimes have this instinct to protect your characters, and that’s really the last thing you wanna do. You really kind of wanna make their lives as difficult as you reasonably can for the sake of the story. I think having kids has been helpful in that you kind of have a sense of, you know, what a kid’s life is like now, which is different from, you know, what my life was when I was growing up.

But at the same time, I try to respect their space. Like, I don’t want them to feel like, “Oh, this happened, and it’s gonna end up in Mom’s book.” So there’s always kinda that line, or at least, you know, you have to ask permission. Like, is it okay if I put this, you know, fill in embarrassing incident in this book?

Well, you know, I grew up as an outsider, because I grew up in an Afro-American neighborhood, and I went to school in Chinatown. And so even though I had friends in both areas, I was always something of an outsider. In my own neighborhood, if we were playing war games – and, again, this will date me – I would serve as the all-purpose Oriental. I’d either be the Japanese that was getting killed, if we’re fighting World War II, or I’d be the Korean getting killed if we were fighting the Korean War.

Or, when I would go into Chinatown – well, I went to a Catholic school. And so if my friends wanted to tell jokes that the nuns wouldn’t understand, my friends would tell the jokes in Chinese. But my parents didn’t speak Chinese at home, so I didn’t have enough Chinese to understand the jokes.