Tuesday night, at my first bookstore event for Champion, I...

Tuesday night, at my first bookstore event for Champion, I received a great, fascinating question about Day. An audience member brought it to my attention that many consider Day a non-PoC character, that because he is described almost entirely as just blond-haired and blue-eyed, his Asian heritage doesn’t really stand for much or contribute much. The question was, “Why did I choose to make Day a PoC character?”

The instant she asked this, I totally understood. I understood the argument and the opinion of Day as a non-PoC character. Day is indeed described as a blue-eyed blonde, and his Asian heritage is mentioned only a couple of times. Day is very easily imagined as a white boy.

I think back on when I first created Day for Legend, and I honestly cannot remember thinking much of his race. I decided to make him a half-Asian, half-white person with blond hair and blue eyes because I saw a photo of a breathtaking Mongolian girl (shown above). My immediate thought was, “God, she’s gorgeous. I want my boy to be this.”

And that was it. That was the extent of my thoughts. In hindsight, I’m a bit embarrassed that I thought so little about it, that at the time I knew almost nothing about YA or the issues of race/lack-of-PoC characters in the book world. It just….didn’t occur to me. I simply wanted a diverse cast with varied races and characteristics, for the same reasons that you might want a cast that don’t all have brown hair or all have green eyes. I implanted this image of Day in my head, shrugged, and then went on to write about him the way I always had. If I were writing a story set in the real world, I think I would have thought harder about the implications of Day’s race.

Perhaps his race mattered so little to me because it mattered so little to him. It mattered so little to everyone in the Republic. The Republic is very much a dystopian world, but there are two things about the Republic that are more utopian than our own society: 1) there is zero gender/sexuality discrimination, and 2) there is zero racial discrimination. No one blinks twice that June or Commander Jameson are top females in the military. No one cares that Day is half-Asian or that Kaede is Japanese or that Pascao is black and gay. The Republic could care less what race or gender or sexual orientation you are. The Republic only cares what your class is. Misogyny, anti-gay bigotry, and racism are replaced here by severe class discrimination. This is the world that Day lives in, one where he is judged not by his appearance but by the poverity of his family. Day is an American who happens to look half-Asian. His race has absolutely no effect on his personality, actions, opinions, and preferences. I’m pretty sure I wrote him like this because I feel like an American who happens to be Asian. Aside from a diehard love for Asian food, the ability to speak and understand Chinese, and a few cultural quirks (i.e. I dislike the number “4”, because in Chinese superstition the word for “4” sounds almost exactly like the word for “death”), I am as wholly, completely American as the next guy. When I visit China, I feel as foreign as when I visit Europe.

I’m not sure I’m doing a very good job of answering the original question here; I’ve never been very comfortable at expressing myself in blog posts or articles. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t mean to create Day to fill a quota or to make a statement. I didn’t mean to “hide” his Asian-ness behind a blond-haired, blue-eyed mask. To think so is to discredit the fact that many people of color exist on a gradient—we are not always so noticeably Asian or Caucasian or Hispanic or African-American, etc. I’ve received quite a few emails over the years from parents who have hapa children with blond hair and blue eyes, and it makes me smile. Day is half-Asian and half-white, but he is not defined by it, nor does he dwell much on it. He’s just….Day.