Going home can mean different things to different family members — even a mother and child.
In a new picture book, "This Is Not My Home," a girl protests loudly and often when her mother tells her they are moving from the United States to Taiwan to care for the girl's aging grandmother. The girl, Lily, prefers the land, the school, the friends she knows in the States.
Immigration isn't a one-way street. Nor is an ancestral land always a paradise of adoring relatives, delicious food and intriguing culture.
"This Is Not My Home"
By Eugenia Yoh and Vivienne Chang
Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 48 pages, $18.99; ages 4-8
"These are not my fireflies," Lily plaintively wails as she squats over an in-ground toilet in front of roach-like onlookers.
Amid the rise in publishing of Asian American stories, "This Is Not My Home" stands out for at least a couple of reasons: Two young college students at Washington University wrote and illustrated it, selling it to a major publisher while they were still cramming for tests. And the book flips the typical immigration story while appealing to any ethnicity.
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"At the core it is a reverse immigration story," says co-author Vivienne Chang. The protagonist is going back "home" and doesn't like it one bit.
"It's an experience we don't think about often," she says. "What would it be like if we had to now adapt to a new culture and community?"
Plus, "it doesn't matter where you emigrate from," she says. "You can emigrate from Taiwan. You can emigrate from, like, France, it is still an immigration story."
Chang's parents moved to the U.S. from Taiwan in the mid-1990s for their master's education. Reared near San Francisco, Chang, an economics and finance major, wanted to live someplace "totally different" for her own college years.
Thus, Washington University in St. Louis. Not only did it have a respected business school, but it was practically the only school she visited that didn't give her food poisoning.
Her co-author and illustrator, Eugenia Yoh, grew up in Los Angeles' Orange County. Like Chang, she's Taiwanese American. They met in part at a Chinese yo-yo club (it's like juggling, Chang says). Because they were among the worst in the club, it gave them a chance to bond.
Yoh, who graduated last year with a degree in communication design, has already gotten a job as a designer with Chronicle Books.
A two-page spread from picture book, "This is Not My Home' by Vivienne Chang and Eugenia Yoh. In it, unhappy protagonist Lily complains that "this is not my farmer's market."
Yoh and Chang's idea for the picture book was informed by friends who had moved back to Taiwan and told them they did not like it.
"It was just kind of baffling," Chang says. "How can you not love the land of great food and people and culture?"
Both women have visited relatives there frequently. "Every time we go it's like, we're having so much fun," Yoh says. "It was interesting to see that someone moving there permanently must have had such a different experience. That was kind of the discrepancy in our head."
Chang confesses to looking at the country through "rose-colored glasses." She says, "My Taiwanese American identity is really close to my heart" and considers her parents' native land a nostalgic part of her childhood.
But with the picture book, they purposely included more than glittery tourist sites. "Taiwan is really lovely in many ways," Yoh says. But any citizen is also familiar with cockroaches and squat toilets, so those things made it into the book.
The speed at which the students wrote and published their book was the stuff of authors' dreams. Chang and Yoh said they wrote it in just about a month, October 2020. Chang made a spreadsheet of possible agents and the kinds of books they were interested in. Another Asian American author looked at their manuscript and agreed they should pitch it to her own agent. By January, the students had a two-book contract with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.
Chang and Yoh were in their sophomore and junior years, respectively. They had also submitted the story to a Polish contest for beginning storytellers. After they sold the book, an email in Polish (and translated through Google) congratulated them for being runners-up in a contest with more than a 1,000 entries.
They were shocked, but the new authors realized that "This Is Not My Home" could resonate with diverse cultures.
Yoh says she hadn't read that many titles with Asian American protagonists while she was growing up. She remembers picture books and middle school readers by Grace Lin, such was "Dumpling Days" and "The Year of the Dog."
"I remember connecting with a lot of the main characters so much with the way one ate Pocky or the way she referenced her whole family going back to Taiwan for a little bit. I felt like I was really heard and this person knows what she's talking about."
Now there are more creators who are Asian American, and Chang believes their audience is growing, but she also emphasizes the universality of the new picture book.
Despite Lily's protestations about her new country's school, food and language, after a few months, she finds one thing that helps her adjust: a new friend.
"I think there are these universal messages," Chang says. "There's a lot of other people who can be involved in your story as well."
Go behind the scenes and follow batches of new books arriving at St. Louis County Library.
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