Grace Lin's Blog, page 28

this week in our garden

So far, our vegetable garden seems to be thriving!


However, as much as the vegetable plants are growing, Rain Dragon's flower bed has remained quite bare. We finally gave up on any seeds sprouting and decided to plant some nursery seedlings instead:


We'll see if these can survive Rain Dragon's enthusiasm:

Learning about my own work

Recently, this link was shared with me (thanks so much, Susan!). It's an academic article titled, Negotiating Asian American Childhood in the Twenty-First Century: Grace Lin’s Year of the Dog, Year of the Rat, and Dumpling Days that was published in The Lion and the Unicorn. I'm quite honored! I think it's the first published academic writing about my work...this is definitely a milestone!

But not only is it a milestone,  the article is so gratifying to me as an author. It  encapsulates the things I was trying to do in my books (show that "....no Asian American child is exactly the same as another.") as well as things I hadn't thought of (Pacy's view of Audrey Chang  in Dumpling Days as a foil for that Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom book).

However, it also brought up a viewpoint of my work that I had never thought about-- the "tourist-multicultural approach to ethnicity." It is true that Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is much more popular than the Year of the Dog;  do readers prefer reading about an Asian of Asia vs an Asian-American?  Something I need to mull over and think about...

on my desk monday

On my desk is a completely awesome dragon scarf hand knit by the equally awesome author/illustrator Mary Newall Depalma:


It is a gift for Rain Dragon (though I am tempted to "borrow" it once the weather gets cold) and she adores it. She runs back and forth wearing it, pretending she is a flying dragon:



If you aren't familiar with Mary's work, you should  be! She is the  incredible author illustrator of  many beautiful books like Two Little Birds:

A Grand Old Tree:

Rain Dragon likes to ad lib with this book and includes celebrities like Bill Cosby, Maisy and Spot in the tree 
And Rain Dragon's favorite,  The Strange Egg:


and it gets her to eat a lot of oranges, tooThanks so much, Mary!!!!

fortune cookie friday

"Stout men, not stout walls, make the stout city."
- Chinese Proverb

this week in our garden

This year, we had the foresight to hire a neighbor boy to water our garden while we were away.  We were rewarded by returning to thriving, green plots (vs the brown, withering plants of year past):


Rain Dragon is fascinated by the little green tomatoes:

And is rather discontent that her own garden remains so bare. We added a flamingo to make her feel a little better:

on my desk monday

On my desk is a photo of the Wildwood School's class of 2013, who awarded Where the Mountain Meets the Moon the Wildwood Medal last year.  Wildwood was one of the schools in CA that I visited last month and I was thrilled to be told that the book had won this very neat award! And it was great fun meeting the students, too!

fortune cookie friday

"What you don't see, you don't desire."
- Chinese Proverb

finagling for a return trip

Do you go to a school in Hawaii? Would you like me to visit your school? Well, I might be back in Hawaii in April, so  maybe I could come*!
And, why (besides it obviously being Hawaii!) might I be coming back? To see the Where the Mountain Meets the Moon play there! Yes, as I may have mentioned earlier, the Honolulu Theater for Youth is putting on their own production of the book:

And it promises to be much different from the other adaptations that I've seen so far. At the conference, the theater put on a short excerpt of their first interpretation of the book. I'm told that the final performance will probably not be like this but what was shown was definitely intriguing! I really liked their idea of mixing a modern aesthetic:


with a very traditional one: this is "The Story of the Old Man of the Moon" told in the Peking Opera theater-styleIt's parallel to my own interpretation of my work, thematically--I like to think of my books as mix of my modern, Asian-American sensibilities and the traditional stories I take inspiration from. So you can see why I'm so interested in seeing the Honolulu Theatre's final product!
So I'm trying to work out a return trip! If you are a Hawaii school, let me* know if you'd be interested in having me for a school visit....it'd definitely help me make my decision!
*contact my school visit coordinator Aimee at gracelinvisits@gmail.com to set it up! Not only would your school not have to pay airfare (as I think the theater would pay for that), it would be the "local fee!" 

this week in our garden

Before we left for Hawaii, our garden was showing promising signs of life:


Even though Rain Dragon seemed more taken with the garden ornaments and the walkway:


We thought Rain Dragon might like a little garden of her own. 
And she does like her garden very much:
Though, she likes stomping in muddy puddles a little bit more...

Inspiration from Hawaii

So, our pilot to Hawaii didn't inspire a lot of confidence:

But Hawaii, itself, was full of inspiration. From the water and beaches:



to the flora and food:

  And, of course, the whole reason why I was in Hawaii in the first place! I was invited to be illustrator keynote speaker for the Biennial Children's Literature Conference in Hawaii. As well as not-to-be-missed opportunity to go to Hawaii (my first time!) it was a huge honor! I was alongside the amazing Kathy Appelt (the author keynote speaker) whose speech was the definition of inspiration:

I got all teary-eyed during her talk!I'm glad I got to know her a little before her speech or else I would've been too much in awe of her to do things like this: children's book author selfies!But what was especially inspirational for me were the people. With Hawaii's huge Asian-American population, for the first time ever, I felt like I was in an environment where I was not an outsider in some way. I've been so used to feeling my minority status (in mainland US not looking like everyone else and in Asia not speaking like everyone else-)that it was really an odd feeling to be in Hawaii where everyone was pretty similar to me. In many ways, it felt like a homecoming for me. 
And what really brought that feeling home was  how well-loved my books were there. At the conference, there were so many students excited about my books! It was really touching.  Many brought drawings and letters. One girl gave me this:

It's a Pacy Passing Doll! Apparently, she was liked the idea of my Pocket Pacys so much that she decided to make her own parallel project--Passing Dolls! What fun!
One family, along with a homemade lei and a well-practiced cheer, gave me this red envelope with ten dollars to give to "a charity of my choice." Isn't that awesome?
They are quite a family! Check out the father's hilarious essays on his Family Matters in Hawaii Blog!
One class came with this interesting project where they had analyzed  Where the Mountain Meets the Moon with the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People!
 


Another school came with "birthday" library books--students donated their favorite book to the library on their birthday, with their own memorializing bookplate:



And did I mention the leis? The beautiful, fragrant leis! In Hawaii, one is given a lei as a symbol of welcome. Well, the people there definitely made me feel welcome, I felt as if everyone I met gave me one. I wish it was a fashion statement I could carry onto the mainland:
weighed down by leis....and this isn't even all of the ones I was given!Mahalo, Hawaii!