17:04:17 	Sarah Park Dahlen	Well, I think maybe we'll go ahead and get started. I am just so thankful to see all of you here at this event. My name is Sarah Park Dahlen. I'm an associate professor here at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences.
17:04:30 	Sarah Park Dahlen	Thank you for coming to our panel. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the hardships that our friends and colleagues in Florida and Iran are facing and so after this panel I encourage you to go see what's going on if you're not familiar, and then find ways to support if you're able.
17:04:46 	Sarah Park Dahlen	So just a little bit of background. Starting this fall, Illinois became the first state in the country to require that all K-12 public educators teach a unit on Asian American community history, and so to that end the Center for Children's Books here at the iSchool, and my Asian American American Youth Literature class (so like a lot of you in the audience are my students), we are thrilled to welcome you to our event: How Youth Literature Can Support the Teaching of Asian American Community History to this panel, with award-winning Asian American youth literature authors Adib Khorram, Rajani LaRocca, Minh Lê, and Andrea Wang.
17:05:28 	Sarah Park Dahlen	So we are deeply grateful for the support and co-sponsorship of the Humanities Research Institute; Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership; the department of Asian American Studies; and the Asian American Cultural Center.
17:05:44 	Sarah Park Dahlen	And so, without further ado, I'd like to introduce our panelists. So Adib Khorram is a queer Iranian-American. His books have won several awards and Accolades (he's being very modest here) such as the William C. Morris Award, the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, a Boston Globe Hornbook Honor, a Stonewall Honor, and...his book...has been named one of Times' 100 best YA Books of all time. So his latest novel Kiss and Tell is out now.
17:06:17 	Adib Khorram 		So nice to be here.
17:06:18 	Sarah Park Dahlen	And Adib, could you introduce Rajani? 
17:06:22 	Adib Khorram		Yes. Oh my gosh, I'm a terrible panelist and I accidentally lost the email. No, I have it. I totally have it. I left the link for the panel, and then I forgot that I need to switch back over.
17:06:39 	Sarah Park Dahlen	All good. I should have reminded you when we were goofing off before this started.
17:06:44 	Adib Khorram		No it's okay, I found the link again. It's all good. So Rajani LaRocca was born in India, raised in Kentucky, and now lives in the Boston area, where she practices medicine and writes award-winning books for young readers, including the Walter Award, the Golden Kite and the Newbery honor-winning middle grade novel in verse, Red, White, and Whole. She's always been an omnivorous reader, and now she is an omnivorous writer of fiction and non-fiction, novels and picture books, poetry and prose.
17:07:13 	Rajani LaRocca		Thank you so much. So I'm gonna introduce Minh Lê, who is an award-winning children's author whose books include Drawn Together, The Blur, Lift, and Green Lantern Legacy. In addition to writing books, Minh is on the faculty of the Hamlin MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, serves on the board of We Need Diverse Books, and has been a contributor to a number of national publications, including NPR, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times and I will just say that not only is he a supremely kind person, but he's also really cool.
17:07:45 	Minh Lê			Oh, that's not in the in the [unintelligible].
17:07:50 	Rajani LaRocca		I'm sorry but I had to add that.
17:08:01 	Minh Lê			Thank you for that lovely introduction. I am going to introduce the fabulous Andrea Wang, who is an acclaimed author of children's books. Her book Watercress is covered in every single [unintelligible] you can imagine, because it was awarded the Caldecott Medal, the Newbery Honor, the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature, the New England Book Award, a Boston Hornbook Honor, and I'm sure, dozens, dozens of State awards, and other honors as well that can't fit on this list. Her other books include Luli and the Language of Tea, which is awesome. Well all these are awesome. The Many Meanings of Meilan, Magic Ramen, and The Nian Monster. They've also received awards and starred reviews. Her work explores culture, creative thinking and identity. Welcome Andrea.
17:08:47 	Andrea Wang		Thank you. Thank you so much Minh, and I have the honor and pleasure of introducing our host and moderator, Sarah Park Dahlen who is an associate professor at the iSchool. She researches and teaches about Asian American youth literature, co-edits research on diversity in youth literature and co-created the Diversity in Children's Books 2015 and 2018 infographics, which I put in all my presentations whenever I can. Her latest academic book, Harry Potter and the Other was co-edited with Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. And now back to Sarah.
17:09:27 	Sarah Park Dahlen	If you couldn't tell from our banter all of us are really good friends too. So it's just really lovely to be in conversation with you. So we're gonna start our conversation, and I do have discussion questions that our panelists have had a chance to look over, but I also welcome your questions and comments in the chat. So please talk alongside us and let us know what your thoughts are about about what we're talking about. And if you have questions for our panelists, please do share them in the chat.
17:09:57 	Sarah Park Dahlen	So what I wanted to ask you all about first: you know I grew up in a heavily Asian American community in Los Angeles, but I didn't learn any Asian American history in school, and so I was wondering in your own K-12 education or in college, what did you learn about Asian American cultures, communities, and histories?
17:10:19 	Minh Lê			I'll go first. I was thinking about this question, and I think in my entire K-12 public school education in suburban Connecticut, we did Asian American history one day, and that was when my dad was invited in to talk about the Vietnam War. That was it. Like that was it. I couldn't think of another example of anything. I'm sure they talked about the Vietnam War to some extent from the U.S. perspective, but other than that that was, that was the totality of it. So I think, I was so excited to see the law in Illinois, and seeing that this generation is going to have much more access to to the knowledge that we were deprived of.
17:11:04 	Sarah Park Dahlen	And Connecticut, I think, became the second or the third state to mandate a similar law that students have to learn Asian American history, so that's phenomenal
17:11:12	Minh Lê			I'll have to tell my dad, he'll be very busy now.
17:11:16 	Adib Khorram		Yeah, I was in high school when the September eleventh attacks happened. So I remember learning nothing about Asian American history except for occasional things about the Vietnam War and then suddenly everyone wanted to know lots of things about Asian American history. And it was all bad.
17:11:37	Andrea Wang		I don't think I learned anything about Asian American history until maybe twelfth grade when we learned about the Chinese exclusion Act and that was about it. Like that was it? I don't think we ever learned about the Vietnam War. And then in college I majored in Chinese studies, and so I learned a lot of Chinese history, but mostly, you know, all in China, and not Asian America or Chinese America.
17:11:59 	Rajani LaRocca		And I also learned no Asian American history K through 12 in Kentucky and I didn't learn anything about our history until I went to college, and that's because I took courses on purpose. But it was usually like that part of the world right? It was like South Asian history, or something like that, so it was not Asian American per se. And then I also, I mean I know this is not part of education, but in popular culture the few times that people from my, you know, original homeland were mentioned, it was always a stereotype. It was often white people playing them on TV. It was really painful and kind of shocking and at the time that I was growing up in the seventies and eighties the culture was very much about assimilation so it wasn't really like people were encouraged to speak another language or show off anything that was unique about their culture in public, either.
17:13:00 	Sarah Park Dahlen 	Yeah, I mean I'm not surprised to hear that it was, any education that you had at all was around the Vietnam War or what is often called the American War in Vietnam by Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans, or about the Chinese Exclusion Act. Usually when people say they learned anything about Asian American history it's in relationship to the American War in Vietnam, the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American Incarceration. So when I started teaching like 13 years ago, I'd ask my students "How many of you have heard about the Japanese American incarceration?" and maybe a third or a half have, and now 13 years later, thankfully, more students have when we talk about it. More students have heard about it in their K-12 education. But oftentimes it's still the only thing that people learn, right?
17:13:52 	Sarah Park Dahlen	So yeah, thank you for answering that. So the title of our panel is "How Youth Literature Can Support the Teaching of Asian American Community History." So I was wondering: so you've all been publishing for a while. So how have you seen your books used to teach Asian American cultures, communities, histories?
17:14:15 	Minh Lê			I went first last time, you need to let someone else go.
17:14:18	Andrea Wang		I'll go then. I always include Asian food in my books and so food is culture. And I've seen, you know, my books used that way. But I think that Watercress has opened up a lot of conversations about what happened in China with the famine and so that part of history I think, is being taught now. Magic Ramen obviously shows post World War II Japan. And so I have had kids during school visits ask me about, you know, where can they find out more information about World War II so I tell them to go ask their librarian because I'm sure there's lots of books out there. So they're offered a good entry point for, you know, learning more about these topics on their own.
17:15:11 	Rajani LaRocca		So I also use a lot of food in my books (surprise). That, I think, is one sure-fire away to bring people together is to talk about amazing food. Some of my books center around holiday celebrations, but holidays that people might not be familiar with. So, for example, Bracelets for Bina's Brothers is about Raksha Bandhan, which is a Hindu holiday featuring sisters and brothers. And so people can talk about that holiday and kind of see how it's unique. And also about the relationships between sisters and brothers and how they're kind of universally hilarious, no matter where you go. And a lot of my books deal with the immigrant experience per se, so Red, White, and Whole features a girl who is kind of torn between the worlds of her immigrant parents and her friends at school, who are mainly white. And my picture books Where Three Oceans Meet and I'll Go and Come Back are about people who have immigrated to the United States going back to see relatives and kind of all the feelings that come up with that. Yeah, so I think that...and then one other thing I'll mention is that Seven Golden Rings, my first picture book, is set in ancient India where there's a Raja. So we have a discussion with younger kids about what a Raja is, and what kind of, you know, government system that is, and how it might be different from what we have here today. So that brings up interesting discussions as well. 
17:16:45 	Adib Khorram		I find my books most often get used with a focus on the mental health component of Darius the Great Is Not Okay. And when Asian American heritage and history and community come in, it's almost always in conversation with the way that those diaspora communities deal with mental health kind of more broadly. But, as everyone else said, also, there is a lot of food, and everyone always says how hungry they get, and it's like yes, because we make amazing food. But I think that often belies a cultural iceberg understanding of it, where you know, food is one of the few things on the top of the iceberg above water. There we are...and I find it rarely goes deeper than that in the conversations I've had, especially with white educators.
17:17:34 	Minh Lê		Yeah, for me, I'd say with Drawn Together because it's about this intergenerational relationship I've seen a lot of teachers use it as an entry point to open up that conversation which often leads to kind of, Asian American history, and really depending on the their students. So it's not a direct line to Asian American history in that way, but it is a direct line to each of our personal histories, right? And the personal histories of our our students. The one that I see used a little bit more in that specific way is the graphic novel I wrote, which is Green Lantern Legacy, and that one introduces a new Vietnamese American Green Lantern, and his grandmother was a Green Lantern. And the origin story, the back story there weaves into kind of the Vietnamese refugee experience. And so, when I was working on that book, I was trying to figure out how to write a superhero, and the idea of recapturing the refugee narrative as a story of heroism is really important to me, so really means when I see schools using that book as an entry point into kind of revisiting and reframing history. And then also re-imagining what it means to be a hero, and what the nature of heroism. So that's the one that for me has been really rewarding.
17:18:56 	Sarah Park Dahlen	Yeah, thank you so much. And you know, some of the books that you mentioned, and even some of the ones that you didn't, a common theme is transnationalism right? We, all of us, our parents, our grandparents, came from another country to this one. And then oftentimes we go back for a variety of reasons, and that also shows up in our stories and what happens in those Asian countries also impacts our experiences here, and so there's there's a really strong connection, right, between the homeland and and our experiences here. So yeah, thank you.
17:19:31 	Sarah Park Dahlen	So I'm gonna back up a little bit and ask even a broader question. Why is it important that we have something that we call Asian American youth literature?
17:19:50 	Adib Khorram		I mean that's a big question and yet it's also...on the one hand, it's very deep, on the other hand, it's very simple. Asian American young people need to see themselves and their cultures reflected every bit as much as their, you know, white Western European descent classmates do. You know, to let them know that they are valued, that they have a place in this world, that they are loved and seen.
17:20:16 	Andrea Wang		I totally agree and I think for all the reasons we've just been talking about, too, you know. I mean, I think it's super important that Asian American kids, you know, read about the mental health issues in Adib's book because there's such a stigma about talking about mental health in the Asian American community. And it just, to be represented, it just makes such a difference.
17:20:46 	Rajani LaRocca		There's also the notion of who is telling your story. I think it's so important that people who are in the community about which they're writing be the ones telling the story, because their own lived experience informs it and that's just irreplaceable. After so many years of getting only the Western world's kind of view on Asians and Asian Americans, it's time for people from those communities to be writing their own stories.
17:21:26 	Minh Lê			I agree with everybody here obviously. Everyone is brilliant and right on point. I would just add that for my personal experience, growing up in Connecticut at school, I would be kind of viewed as the token Asian kid. And at home I would be viewed as the "too American" kid, right? So I like, had this identity of always feeling in between these two different worlds, and it was through the process of writing that I kind of slowly claimed, began to reclaim that in-between space and realized it isn't an in-between space and that space is just as valid as any of these imaginary pure American or pure Vietnamese experiences that I have been kind of self imposing.
17:22:06 	Minh Lê			This pull towards either one and feeling deficient because I wasn't one or the other right? So I think having something like Asian American youth literature, like everyone has said, is an opportunity for readers to kind of claim that space, claim their own space, claim their own identities in a way that is robust and valid. And the fact that kids these days are gonna start from a place of knowing they belong, instead of having to prove it to themselves or claim it themselves. I think it's going to be hugely exciting for not just them, but for us as readers, because they're gonna come up with books that take it to that next level. That they're, they don't have to write their own origin stories right? They get to kind of BE now, and write anything, which is really exciting to to me. 
17:23:00 	Minh Lê 			So yeah to Rajani's point about who gets to tell your story, I remember growing up, anytime I go to a bookstore or a library I got so excited because there's like this huge section on Vietnam, right? So I run to it and it's like, they're all about the war, and they're all from the U.S. perspective, and my own people were just bystanders in our own story. And so the fact that we now have the opportunity to claim that space and claim that story means a lot. And I think for young readers today, hopefully, that makes a big difference. 
17:23:29 	Rajani LaRocca		Minh, can I just jump onto that that whole notion of not feeling like enough of anything--not American enough, and not Indian enough. I totally felt that my entire childhood, and I think...so I told kids at school visits today that, you know, part of this whole notion of, "Where do you belong?" One of the things I've learned when I finally became an adult (kind of) is that we create the places where we belong. So we belong if we feel we belong, right? We surround ourselves with people who who encourage us and love us and support us. But the other side to that is that we create the communities where everyone belongs. So we have to start doing that actively. You know, starting with childhood. So I totally, I just, to this day don't feel either enough. I don't feel Indian enough or American enough, and I just have to exist and be comfortable in that space and say, "You know what? This is my family, my life. This is the way we do things, and no one else has to do it our way, but we're happy." So it's, yeah that just resonated with me so much.
17:24:31 	Andrea Wang		Me too, and I love that all of our books and all the Asian American youth literature, it's giving young readers the language to respond to a lot of the microaggressions that they face. And you know that they are now spreading the word because they have language from all of these books to talk about these feelings.
17:24:55 	Adib Khorram		I would agree, and I think, you know, as much as all of us are really focused on readers in our community, one of the great things our books and Asian American literature in general does, is it reaches outside that community and combats prejudice with knowledge and empathy. And that's incredibly important.
17:25:25 	Minh Lê			Oh, I was gonna say: one other kind of clarification I want to add to what I said before was the fact that I said before that writers now or readers now don't have to claim that space and prove they belong. The sad truth is that that's not really the case, because there is so much pushback, and that there are so many kids who still feel either that they have to prove that they they belong, especially all the book bans that we've been hearing about. That isn't something that is over and done with, and it's going to unfortunately be something that is still going on right now.
17:25:55 	Sarah Park Dahlen	So I had a million different threads of thoughts as you all were sharing, and because Minh was the last to speak I'm just gonna jump to the question about book challenges because yesterday we read an article about the 400 children's and young adult books that were banned in multiple school districts in Florida. And there were books on it, like Debbi Michiko Florence's Flamingo Keeper. Jasmine Toguchi, Flamingo Keeper, in which she just wants a pet flamingo. One of Grace Lin's fantasy novels was on it. There was some book like Molly of Denali, was on it. And the connection that we could make among the books that were challenged--or were banned actually, not just challenged, but banned, on this list--is that they're written by and feature people of color or written by people who are queer and feature people who are queer, or an intersection right? Because we've got intersectionality and so what you were saying Minh about we should just be able to exist in our stories, but there are challenges to even just existing. And you know, stories that are just about joy and fantasy and wanting to have a pet flamingo are being banned in classrooms, and so I don't want to put you through any trauma but have your books been challenged or questioned? How have people fought back, or do you, or what are some of the innovative ways that you've seen people fight back against book bans and challenges?
17:27:38 	Adib Khorram		So far I've only had one book challenged as far as I know, and none outright banned. But I've certainly been following the situation closely. In addition to the article about Florida, I also read an article about how a school in Pennsylvania banned Girls Who Code because it was too activist. I've read another article about how some librarians are simply using the weeding process to avoid dealing with challenges and kind of preemptively [uninteilligble] things. I think, you know, we talk about what can be done and at the end of the day it's the same thing it has always been. Go to your school board meetings. Vote in your local elections. Ultimately, that is the only way to combat it is to be on the ground fighting it. I also think you know, so many of these bannings have a place of fear and hatred, and I was reading a thread on Twitter actually about the new Rings of Power television series and kind of the representation of people of color and fantasy and someone made this point that you know people aren't mad that we can escape to a fantasy world where people like us exist. They're mad that they can no longer escape to a place where people like us don't exist. And I got like chills reading that, and it's so messed up and I don't know where I was going with that I completely got myself off track. So now someone else has to talk.
17:29:23 	Rajani LaRocca		Someone mentioned in the chat that kids ask for books that are banned because it makes them exciting. So that's cool. I mean, I think that the New York Public Library opening up their ebook collection to everybody, to anybody who wants to borrow them, including especially banned books is great. I agree with everything that Adib just said, just talking about being involved locally, you know, and making your voice heard, and just continuing to buy and support these books. It is terrifying to me that it's the 21st century and we are doing this again. I mean like really. I don't understand. And those lists that you talk about a lot of times basically they're just anybody who seems to be brown, on the brown spectrum somewhere, or on the queer spectrum somewhere. And that's pretty much it. And it's horrible. It's like somebody took a diversity list and said, "Now we're gonna ban all these books." So yeah.
17:30:26 	Sarah Park Dahlen	Yeah, people are saying stop making diversity lists because they're using these lists for the basis of their banned books list. Really? Like we stop making these lists then?
17:30:40 	Andrea Wang		Yeah to my knowledge none of my books have been banned or challenged, but I feel like it's just a matter of time. I'm just waiting and scanning lists and expecting it to happen, given the state of everything. And I totally agree with everything Rajani and Adib said. And you know, going to school board meetings, etc. and I think it's what happened, I think, was it last year? The year before in York, Pennsylvania? Where the students themselves led the rally. They rallied, and they got that ban overturned and so I mean, that's amazing. That gives me so much hope that the students are leading the way. So yeah, just keep supporting diverse books as much as you can. And if you are one of the brave people on Tiktok or Booktalk, and you want to talk about our books on Bookstalk, that would be great!
17:31:41 	Sarah Park Dahlen	Yeah, and you know I'm really glad Kim said what they did in the chat about how their kid asks for a book once they see that it's been challenged on TikTok and yeah, books might get a little bit of a bump in sales or checkouts because it's been banned or challenged. But in the long term you know, there's, having a book on a list causes an awful lot of trauma and distress right to the writer, or the illustrator, and it's really only like the very highly visible books that are gonna get, you know, like the way Maus sold out when when it was banned in, where was it? Mississippi? Somewhere in the south?
17:32:28 	Adib Khorram		Tennessee I think.
17:32:34 	Sarah Park Dahlen	Okay Tennessee, yeah. So not that every book gets that kind of coverage. Not every book gets that kind of sales, and so We Need Diverse books actually has a really good great blog post if you go...and they tweeted it and it's also on their blog, explaining/sort of debunking all the mythologies around why, getting your book on a banned books list is actually a good thing--it's not. It's very distressing and it doesn't in the long term end, end up with bigger sales.
17:32:57 	Sarah Park Dahlen	So we're gonna pivot and talk about something else. So I want to talk about craft since you're all writers, and obviously award-winning writers. But we want readers to learn something about Asian America, right? About our experiences, our cultures, etc. And we also want to tell a good story and you know because you're all award-winning writers, you know that these things are not mutually exclusive. And so I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your writing process, your research to write your books, and just how you think about book craft.
17:33:37 	Minh Lê			I don't have anything too specific at the moment, but I was thinking about when I'm writing a story, often, for me it's trying to find characters that behave in a way that is emotionally true within a situation. So it's like, I understand the scenario of a grandfather and a grandson spending time together. And you can have all these different scenarios, and for me the truth of the story comes in how the characters behave and how they're acting and whether or not...to me that's the craft of coming up with something that feels authentic and feels real, and that can resonate with people who both have that same experience, but also have different experiences, right? And something that we talk about all the time is that one way of getting to the universal is to dive into the specific right? So not to be afraid of diving into your particular experience, because what you're going for is something that rings true, and that becomes universal. So as far as craft is concerned, it's like being willing to to to dive deeper and emerge broader. If that makes sense?
17:34:54 	Rajani LaRocca		Absolutely. I often tell kids that the stories I write are fiction, but the emotions in them are true. So I try and take real feelings that I've had and put them into my stories, even though the character may not be anything like me. Sometimes the character is a lot like me, but sometimes the character is not, and and try to let the emotions ring true, as Minh was just talking about. And quite honestly, I was talking about this before we began the panel: sometimes I just take childhood traumas--some were very small, some were larger--and I throw them into a book. Because those are the things that stick with you. I just had a school visit today, and I talked to those kids that were 4th through 7th grade. And I said, "Remember the things that you care about right now. Think about those and think about the things that really bother you and hurt you, because those are the things that are probably gonna stick with you forever." So yeah, I think my own lived experience is fodder for a lot of stories.
17:35:52 	Andrea Wang		I totally agree. I mean that's all that Watercress was. There was that one particular trauma of mine, and it's interesting, Minh, you were saying, you know, the specific leads to the universal, and when I wrote Watercress, I did not, I did not understand that. In fact, I thought that because it was such a specific story about my experience as a child of an immigrant that it couldn't be a book, no one was going to buy it, no one could relate. And it turned out that everybody could relate to their parents embarrassing them, you know, in some way or another, or being ashamed of some aspect of their family life. So that has been a huge surprise for me, but I do still draw a lot upon my own experiences like what you were saying, Rajani, and you know, writing about those memories that kind of haunt us and fictionalizing them, but, so I start there and just try to lean into the vulnerability, and just let it all out on the page.
17:37:02 	Adib Khorram		I think, for me, I'm a very selfish writer and so I'm never thinking about what other people are going to experience with my books, or what people will learn. I'm only thinking about, it's almost always a question I have or something that's been bothering me, and I have to ask myself what's the, you know, who is a character that can help me unpack this question? And I think because I'm a queer Iranian  American, and because I just don't see myself writing books that don't center queer Iranian Americans, that part of it just is almost incidental to the story I'm going to tell, and each story will share a different part and a different amount of my own life and my own experience with my culture. And I think there's no process for me. It just kind of happens organically.
17:38:02 	Rajani LaRocca		So just kind of jumping off there. So when I first started writing, which was like, return to writing, like a little over a decade ago, I mean I don't know if anybody else shares the experience...I started writing about white people first. 
17:38:27	Sarah Park Dahlen	A lot of people say that.
17:38:29 	Rajani LaRocca		Because I think that's all I ever read!
17:38:30	Adib Khorram		All of my [unintelligible] novels were about white people.
17:38:33	Rajani LaRocca		Right? And then, at one point I just kind of realized, "Why am I doing this?" And I started kind of digging deeper as Andrea said, kind of being more vulnerable in my writing, and I was like, "Oh, this is the kind of story I should be writing." What was I thinking? But I think it's because and you know this is what happens when you grow in, grow up in a society where you never see yourself in the pages of a book. You're like, this is what books are about. Books are not about people like me. Books are about other people. So that was a kind of a shocking thing for me.
17:39:07 	Andrea Wang		And going back to our conversation. Well, we started this conversation talking about how, you know, we were never taught Asian American history, and you know riffing off of what Adib was saying. He follows something he's curious about or something that upsets him. And for me I tend to write to explore my culture because I never learned about it in school. Or the history, especially. I love finding out the hidden stories of Asian Americans. And you know I was interested in filial piety, and I had no idea what that meant when I was little, but I felt the weight of it in my family, and so I wanted to write about that and that led me down many, many rabbit holes. And then the trick is to try and distill it down to, you know, picture book or middle grade, or YA level, yeah. 
17:40:13	Sarah Park Dahlen	Or the basket in The Many Meanings of Meilan, right?
17:40:14 	Andrea Wang		Yep, yeah exactly.
17:40:14	Sarah Park Dahlen	So I mean what I really appreciate about what you all said is you know these stories that you're writing are not just these boxed-in Asian American stories, but there are so many entry points for other readers to come in and care about the characters or to learn something about their experiences. And it reminds me, Andrea, of Jason in his acceptance speech, his Caldecott acceptance speech he talked about, I think, it was a little black student, a very young black child that he met, and the child came up to him, and said something that really, he connected really well with Watercress. And I don't remember the exact exchange they had. But Jason was like, this book is not just for, you know, Asian American readers. But readers everywhere of all different backgrounds can find an entry point into the story right? And to appreciate it and enjoy it.
17:41:11 	Andrea Wang		Yeah I think that child came up and said that they were an immigrant, too. And that they had just moved to wherever the school visit was, from another state in the United States. But to that child, that was a monumental experience, right? Of being relocated. So yeah, he really related to Watercress in that way. They were from somewhere else.
17:41:37 	Minh Lê			For all of us when we talk about growing up, not seeing ourselves in a book, there's a skill to find making that empathetic leap into a character that, who resembles almost nothing like you really. I used to read a lot of Greek mythology, and I always say that, I found myself relating to Hercules, which was the exact opposite of the skinny Vietnamese American kid growing up in Connecticut, but you find that way, and that's kind of the power of literature. That's the power of reading. So now it's like that same gift for readers who are just so used to seeing themselves in every book now being able to work to make that empathetic leap into a character that is not like themselves is also a gift. I think if that's why it's strange just see so much resistance to it. When it's like this is, this is an exercise in the power of books, right?
17:42:28 	Sarah Park Dahlen	Yeah. And you know there's also resistance to that, like Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas writes about the imagination gap in her book, The Dark Fantastic, and in it people have an imagination gap where they can't imagine themselves into a situation that they're not familiar with because they have so often seen only themselves and so it's hard for them to imagine themselves into a different situation. (Everybody should go read that book, it's so good.) But yeah, it's just, these books are an opportunity to do so, and if we start that at a very young age then it's even more, it'll just become part of their everyday reading experiences.
17:43:06 	Sarah Park Dahlen	So I wanna go back to Jason real quick. So none of us, as far as I know, are illustrators at all? Like no? I draw stick figures. But what I wanted to ask about is your process with working with your illustrators or the person who is designing your book cover? Just in the ways that you were conscious about the Asian American aspects of it, right? Like what was going to be on the cover? Who was going to be on the cover? What kind of considerations went into that, or for your picture books, like how did you...what was the process? I just want to shout out the illustrators a little bit.
17:43:46 	Andrea Wang		Well, I think my experience working with Jason Chin is unusual in that it was really collaborative and I'm not sure how many people here know that most authors and illustrators of picture book don't talk to each other during the process. We're not encouraged to usually, although you know now with social media we'll probably still just say hi or something. But since Watercress was so autobiographical our editor actually had us meet, and we shared a lot of family stories. And I shared with him my photos of when I was little etc., but I've always been very conscious of, since my books are about Asians and Asian Americans, I have always requested Asian or Asian American illustrators. And I've been really really fortunate. The Many Meanings of Meilan was illustrated by someone who wasn't Asian. She did a fantastic job, but I did go back to her and say the eyelids aren't right. You know, we, most of us don't have creases in our eyelids, and it wasn't something that she intentionally did, or didn't, you know? She just wasn't aware. And so we had a great conversation about that, and they fixed it. So that's great, you know? But those are some of the things that I tend to look for.
17:45:18 	Minh Lê			When I wrote Drawn Together, I write, you can probably tell if you read the book, there's very few words in the books I write. And I kind of try to trim it down as much as possible to give the artist room to come to the story. And with Drawn Together, I'm Vietnamese American and Dan Santat is Thai American and I wrote the story from my perspective, but put the note that if you would like to illustrate this and draw on your own experience that'd be fantastic. I mean, please feel free. And so he took that very slim story, which is probably like two pages long maybe? And just like invested so much of himself. And he did all this research on the character that the grandfather paints himself as, is this like intricate Thai warrior that you'll find, in Buddhist temples in Thailand. In my mind I was picturing like some dude in a robe or something. So the fact that he took the time to draw something so intricate is totally beyond me. But for me it's kind of like, building that space for collaboration in the manuscript, so that the the artist has something that they can work with, that they can sink their teeth into.
17:46:29 	Minh Lê			Another fun detail with Drawn Together is that the characters in the book speak Thai because that's Dan's culture. But Dan doesn't speak or read Thai either, so all the father's text is actually Dan's mom's handwriting, because he did what most of us do if we have a problem: he called his mom. It's like, "Can you write these sentences in Thai for me and then I'll scan it and put it in a book." And so it very much became a very personal, very family infused story in that way. I think that really made it as special as it could be, because we were both so invested in it.
17:47:03 	Minh Lê			And another quick note on the collaboration process with our editor, too, in the book we don't...we went back and forth to decide whether on the page where the grandfather's speaking if we should include a little note to say what he's saying, like the translation on the page? And we went back and forth and decided to leave it out, to give the reader the opportunity to feel what it's like to be that character in that moment, not understanding what the other person is saying. So kind of in that way, replicating that experience for the reader and that kind of level of discomfort by withholding a little bit. If you do have the book, the translations are in the front, right above like the mom's cards. So that answer is in there but for that moment of reading, we wanted to be like, okay, well, let's leave this empty space for discomfort so that you're currently drawn more into the the emotional reality of the characters.
17:47:59 	Sarah Park Dahlen	I don't know if you know this Minh, but when I give presentations on Asian American youth literature, I actually have that in my slideshow as an example of respecting Asian languages and Asian words, because a lot of times you'll just see chicken scratch right? It's not an actual Asian language, it's just made to look as if it's Asian. And so this is the example that I use to be like, this is how you actually do it. 
17:48:28 	Adib Khorram		Yeah, or they turn on a like katakana alphabet on their keyboard and type in English, and then it makes nonsense words.
17:48:33 	Sarah Park Dahlen	Yeah, Adib, do you wanna talk about how involved are you in the process of making the cover?
17:48:38	Adib Khorram		Yeah, I was very uninvolved. Early on my book was assigned to a different designer but there was an Iranian American designer at Penguin, Samira Iravani, who saw it on someone else's desk and said, "No, this is mine now." And so she and I had a conversation. Mostly it was talking about Orientalist tropes we wanted to avoid, and we kind of just talked about all the books about Iran, or about that area of the world that had been written by white people, and that had really terrible covers, and we were just like, let's do none of this. And beyond that I was like, "I draw stick figures, I trust you." And the actual illustrator is Brazilian and Samira had worked with him on several other books, including most of Nina LaCour's. But yeah, it just came back and I was at lunch with my friend when the cover came in, and I remember just getting very teary-eyed seeing my father's hometown, you know, depicted on the cover of a book. So I really kind of lucked out in a way that it was, you know, I had a fellow Iranian American involved with that aspect of it.
17:49:54 	Rajani LaRocca		I feel like I've had really really good fortune with working with illustrators and having the covers of my books kind of done the way that they have been. So I have two picture books from two different publishers that are both illustrated by Archana Areenivasan and both of those books are so different from each other and she's amazing. So my first picture book was Seven Golden Rings with Lee and Low, and that is set in ancient India, and involves a Raja, and a poor boy and his mom, and a math puzzle and all kinds of complicated kind of solutions to this math puzzle that involves binary numbers. And I have to say, Archana lives in India. She actually lives in the city where my entire family is from, and her knowledge of ancient India meant that I didn't have to say a thing. I was like, "This is kind of the time period," and she was like I got it. And then she just ran with it, and she put in all these details, like, you know: the wealthy people in this world, they wore shoes, and they had kind of fancy, colorful clothes. And the main character had no shoes. He had a little scarf around his neck, and otherwise he was bare chested, and it was like, that was just the way it was. But he had a little wooden amulet around his arm, that you know would do at that time. It was just so amazing, and her details were just incredible.
17:51:12 	Rajani LaRocca		And then the other book is Where Three Oceans Meet. That is published by Abrams and her style...and so that is a contemporary story. About a girl who goes to India to visit her relatives, and she goes on a trip to the southern tip of India with her mother and grandmother, and kind of all the little wonderful moments they experience together. And what she finds at the end of the world, you know, what she was searching for. And that was, I mean just, Archana did such an incredible job with that book, and she used her own grandmother, her own grandmother's house as the model for the the scene in the beginning of the book and her own grandmother's sari. I think maybe her own grandmother, like what her grandmother looked like, and that just made me feel so wonderful because it really felt like it was our book right? It was her family in my story, which I thought was just so lovely.
17:52:04 	Rajani LaRocca		And then Bracelets for Bina's Brothers was illustrated by Chaaya Prabhat, who's in Tamil Nadu, and so she had just an amazing and exuberant style, and then I'll Go and Come Back (my most recent picture book out with Candlewick) is illustrated by Sarah Palacios, who is not Indian American. But she knows what it is like to go back and forth between two countries and the way that she depicts the differences between the scenes set in India and the scenes set in the U.S. are just absolutely stunning. So sometimes you don't necessarily have to have an illustrator who shares your background, but it definitely helps. But I'm just always in awe. I don't really interfere with what the illustrators do, because they're amazing and they're half the book and they just do such an incredible job. 
17:53:00 	Andrea Wang		I feel like it's a relief when an Asian American illustrator is assigned to one of my books because it's their own lived experience, and I don't have to worry about all those details, you know? I feel like I'm so focused on trying to get my own text accurate and authentic and representative, and makeing sure every detail in my text is right that I don't have the the brain space left to think about the illustrations. And so I love in The Nian monster, because Alina Chau is originally from Hong Kong, she knew everything about how to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year. And there's a, you know, a decoration in the back of one of the spreads where the character for good fortune is upside down. And that's purposefully upside down because you want good fortune to spill into your home. And so I, you know it was just such an amazing detail and a relief to not have to explain that to someone else.
17:53:56 	Sarah Park Dahlen	So I'm gonna combine a ton of my remaining questions, and also a question from the audience in the last seven, oh, now six minutes. So one of my questions and a question that someone else asked is, what's next for you? What are you working on, and more specifically, are you working on or dreaming up stories that you really want to tell because they have not yet been told? So that's one of them. And then another one is, if you were to mash up one of your books with a book that someone else on this panel wrote, which one would it be and why? And if other people want to like put questions in the chat, I don't know how much time we're gonna have left. But yeah. So either of those, both of those.
17:54:50	Minh Lê			I would like, since everyone here writes, to some extent, or incorporates food in their books, I wanna do a mashup of all of our stories. So we can get together and have a launch party with a buffet of all of our different favorite foods. I'm not sure that's cheating on your question, but that's what, that's what I'm dreaming about right now.
17:55:02 	Sarah Park Dahlen	That is a little bit cheating, because I wanna know what characters would hang out together. But that's okay. That sounds, I wanna be at that party.
17:55:15	Andrea Wang		I was totally thinking the same thing. I think that when we took the Lift, the elevator from Lift and we had it stop and be a portal into everybody else's story, just with the food thing. 
17:55:21	Minh Lê			Like take a bowl of food and like sneak out.
17:55:28 	Sarah Park Dahlen	There we go. See, we're writing a new picture book just through this panel.
17:55:33 	Rajani LaRocca		We could also do a superhero team-up where each of us writes a different superhero. That would be fun, too, and make it a graphic novel. I would be totally up for that graphic novel.
17:55:41 	Sarah Park Dahlen	Yeah, Darius is gonna bring the tea. No, no, you [Andrea] have a teabook, and Darius has a teabook. Yeah, those characters would all hang out together. 
17:55:56	Andrea Wang		That would be awesome.
17:55:58 	Minh Lê			Yeah, I sent Adib a message when I was reading Darius, because there's a point early in the book where he talks about putting tumeric in his pasta sauce. And I was like, "I do the same thing!" Like an example of that cross-cultural connection
17:56:14	Adib Khorram		Yeah, right, the sauce doesn't have enough color. It's bright red! It doesn't have enough color! I was actually also gonna say, I think Drawn Together reminded me so much of Darius, and his grandfather's difficulties communicating as well as my own difficulties communicating with my own grandparents. So I think, that was definitely the crossover I would pick
17:56:45 	Sarah Park Dahlen	What about future writings? What stories do you want to tell that have not yet been told?
17:56:51 	Adib Khorram		Well, a) I don't like people to know my business and b) a lot of my business is secret, and I'm not allowed to talk about it. But there's stories that I have been wanting to tell that I'm getting to tell, that sooner or later I'll be allowed to announce, which is very exciting. But the next book that I am allowed to talk about is a picture book called Bijan Always Wins about a little Iranian American boy who makes everything in life a competition to be won, and alienates all his friends in the process, which I just feel like there's maybe a lot of first-born Iranian sons that could use that lesson as well. I was a younger child. I have plenty of first-born Iranian son cousins who need to learn this lesson.
17:57:36 	Sarah Park Dahlen	I was gonna ask you to what extent that was autobiographical?
17:57:40 	Adib Khorram		Autobiographical, being on the receiving end. Insufferable first child syndrome. Oh my goodness.
17:57:55	Rajani LaRocca		Well, I have...okay, so I have six books coming next year. I have two novels and four picture books.
17:58:00 	Adib Khorram		Oh my god, why aren't you like hibernating? You have to store your energy.
17:58:01 	Rajani LaRocca		You know how you how books go--you don't always control when they come out, so they just show up whenever they're gonna show up. So there's no standard gestation period for books, they just show up. So yeah, I've got a novel, another novel in Bruce called Mirror to Mirror about twin sisters who are musical, but one of them has anxiety, so it addresses some of the the mental health issues that people don't really want to talk about. And my novel is co-written with a friend of mine so I only wrote half a book, and I got a whole book which is nice. And it's a fantasy about two kids (well I don't know, a contemporary fantasy), about two kids who meet at camp and find some interesting rocks, and then start writing letters to each other, because weird things are happening and they're wondering if the rocks are not actually rocks. And I've got two non-fiction picture books and two fiction picture books. One about a grandson and a grandfather and masala chai. So I'm gonna join your, you know tea group and then another book that is about summer and cousins which I'm so excited about because that's one of my dearest memories is going to visit all my cousins and being together in a big group in India. And then, but okay, so this has been announced, so I can just talk about it really quickly, is this notion about who gets to tell your story? I just handed in the first draft of a fantasy set in a fantasy world that involves colonialism, and different kinds of notes and letters and things that are published from different groups and the notion of what an event means, depends on whose point of view you've got so I'm very excited about that, and that's coming in a couple of years.
17:59:39 	Andrea Wang		Oh, wow, I have a picture book coming out. Non-fiction-ish about Joseph Pierce who was a Chinese person who fought in the American Civil War, whom we, you know don't usually hear about because he took the name Joseph Pierce because it doesn't indicate that he's Chinese at all. And that's coming out 2024, and I also have a camp book, Rajani, and that's coming, it's a middle grade, coming out also in 2024, and it's set at a Chinese heritage camp.
18:00:15	Rajani LaRocca		Oh my gosh I can't wait to read that!
18:00:17 	Andrea Wang		Alright, Minh.
18:00:19	Minh Lê		So I have, I think seven books coming out in the next four years. So the one I can talk about is, that I'm really excited about at the moment, is a graphic novel called Enlighten Me, which is set at a silent meditation retreat. And what I'm, what I was thinking about when you were saying what books you wish you could have read, or what wasn't there when I was a kid. I remember seeing so many books I was like, I know that I'm only getting a third of the references because I'm not Christian, I haven't read the Bible, I don't know what all these allusions are, right? So this one is set in a Buddhist silent meditation retreat, and while they're there the main character, they have a story time for the kids, and they listen to stories about the Buddhist past lives which are called the J?taka tails, so then he while he's listening enters into the worlds of each of those stories. And for me it was kind of a fun way to engage with that level of kind of filling in the gaps that I didn't have when I was a kid, because I didn't understand the the Christian side of things. But kind of coming at it in a different way. Also, I just like the challenge of writing a story at a silent meditation retreat, and how would you do that? So that comes out, you know, in a little while.
18:01:40	Sarah Park Dahlen	Wow! That is so exciting to know that you have so many books coming out. I hope to be teaching Asian American youth literature forever after, and as we know, all readers need to see all people in all of our stories. And so yeah, please definitely keep writing. I wanted to thank all of you for coming to this panel tonight. Thank you to our panelists for sharing about your books and your lives and your craft. Yes, please keep writing. Also, thank you to our co-sponsors, and to the CCB at the iSchool for hosting this event.