“I guess you could say I found my voice on the page when I wrote this book.”
In your author’s note, you say that this is your most personal book yet. Because of that, you write, creating this story was often nerve-racking. What led you to decide to bring Maizy’s story to the page?
Growing up, I knew little about Chinese American history. Sure, I’d heard some things and maybe even read a little bit here and there, but it wasn’t taught in elementary or high school. When I took an elective in college about the Chinese in America, for the first time, my eyes were opened.
When we first meet Maizy, she’s a very sophisticated middle schooler from Los Angeles who grew up knowing a ton about television and advertising because of her mom’s job as a food stylist. She experiences a bit of culture shock when she and her mom head to small-town Minnesota to help out her aging grandparents. Did you ever have a similar moment of culture shock in your own life?
Sadly, like many real-life Asian American kids and teens, Maizy also experiences quite a bit of racism in Minnesota, both when her grandparents’ restaurant is vandalized and when she is made fun of for her eyes by a girl in the neighborhood. Those scenes were incredibly painful to read; what was the process of writing them like?
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