Christina Soontornvat

I grew up in a pretty small town in north Texas. It’s about an hour west of Dallas and it’s called Weatherford. And the reason that I lived there was because my family started a Chinese slash Thai restaurant. So when we moved there, this was the first Asian restaurant in the whole county. So we were one of the, my family was one of the first Asian American families living in the town. So I was one of the only Asian American kids who went to my school. And it was a pretty typical small town life. I feel like when you live in a small town, you’re surrounded by storytellers, you’re surrounded by stories, especially being at the restaurant. People come in and everybody’s so comfortable with each other, everybody knows each other, so they’re kind of sharing all of these things about their lives all the time. So I remember my uncles chatting with people and them sharing stories of how long their families had been in the town and silly things that had happened to them.

And then of course, the staff is always talking to the customers, telling the same stories over and over again. And so, I mean, I feel like I was just surrounded by stories all the time. I definitely learned how to tell a joke being in … growing up in the restaurant because the waiters, they were so, they loved jokes they loved. Customers would come in and they would tell a joke, tell jokes to them. So I would hear them give the joke many times it was sort of growing up in a standup comedy, in a standup comedy hole, but a lot cleaner. Very clean humor, clean jokes, and just learned how much something funny, how a fun story can really just brighten someone’s day, make them smile, and make them immediately connect with you.

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Dallas is such a diverse city. And of course there were lots of Thai people that we hung out with. My dad had a lot of Thai friends who lived there. And then so moving to a smaller town where it wasn’t as diverse. And I think my school, I went back and looked and I think it was like 87% white demographic. And so feeling instantly unique, very different. Teased sometimes, but just less being ostracized, but more just constantly being aware that I was different and feeling like I didn’t exactly have things in common with my classmates. I think that made me, I think that’s one of the reasons I was such a big reader. I mean, for one thing, I was always at the restaurant. I was always hanging out with my parents there. I had to go there after school. I had to hang out there on the weekends.

I’m an only child, and so that I couldn’t be left home alone. I had to go with them. And this is before iPads, before internet. So if I wasn’t drawing, I was reading or I would be asked to help out. So if I didn’t want to be put to work, I would have to just sit in the corner with a book. But I also think that there was a little bit of escapism where I was trying to imagine myself as the hero, imagine myself in these fantasy worlds. I read a lot of fantasy as a kid, a lot of magical stories. And I think it was because I felt so different in the real world. I was looking for a place for myself, and I found that in books.

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My experience is very similar to authors of color who are about my age, where there were authors, there were Asian American authors writing, there were authors of color putting out books, but I didn’t have access to those. We didn’t have a bookstore in my town and our school library just didn’t have those titles. So I’m always reminded about this when we’re talking about diverse books. It’s one thing to write the books, but then you also have to have this connection between, it’s either the librarian or the book seller or someone in your life who’s going to get that book into your hands as a reader. And that’s just what I didn’t have. So I wasn’t looking for it because honestly, at that time in the eighties and even in the nineties, I just didn’t even question it, that if I was going to read a fantasy story, it was going to be set most likely in the British isles.

In some imagined world that was like Ireland. And I just did not even expect anything different. I mean, that was just the soup that I swam in. And it wasn’t until I was a grownup that I found a book written by an Asian American author that featured an Asian American girl on the cover. And that book was “Millicent Min, Girl Genius” by Lisa Yee. And I mean, even as I was 20 something years old, and I was like, what? It just really hits you. Even now today, seeing some books come out, it just, sometimes it’s like, hits me. If only I had that, you know? Don’t know what you were wishing for until you see it. You don’t know what you were missing until you fi … until you find it. I have a seventh grader and a fourth grader. I definitely, I mean, I don’t know if you can see just being an author.

I get sent books all the time, so our house is just full of books, which is, that’s so wonderful. And I’m so grateful for that fact in our life. They’re reading so much more diversely than I was. And part of that is even as a parent, when they were little, I had to educate myself on the books that I was choosing. It’s just this implicit bias that we have that I realized when my daughter was in Pre-K that I didn’t have enough diverse books on our shelf at home and was just like, oh, we really do have to work to overcome these pressures that have been put on us all our lives. And so I’ve done a lot as a parent to try to diversify our bookshelves and the things that we read at home. But of course, they’re, they go to public schools where their librarians are so wonderful and just so supportive of having diverse books featuring those. So I feel incredibly lucky and happy for them.

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We need diverse books because those are great stories and we need to fill our lives with great stories.

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I didn’t know I was going to become a writer. I never thought about that as a career. It never, I liked to write, and I actually don’t think I realized how much I liked writing until later. When I went back and I looked at journals that I kept, or assignments that I did from school. I was like, oh, I actually wrote a lot as a young person. But it was just never in my mind that somebody like me could do that for a job. I just really had this stereotype of a writer that, you know, had to be literary. You had to be live in New York City, you know, had to have gone to a good school, Oxford University or something like that. Those were the kinds of writers that I like to read. I think because I was such a voracious reader, I read above my level.

I mean, I just kind of ran out of books and just kept going. So I was reading literary works. I read Victor Hugo, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles and all of these things like before we were reading them in school. So I don’t really know what that did to my writing style, but I think it got in there somewhere. When I think back a lot about being a kid, about being a young person, just as an only child, and parents who are so busy, I just spent so much time by myself with books and just thinking about those stories. Just kind of a dreamer, I guess. Daydreaming a lot. Daydreaming a lot in class when I was supposed to be paying attention. Daydreaming a lot in church, so I’m not really sure what it did. It did something that has to do something to you, right.

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Kids do ask me for writing advice. And when it comes to The Tryout and memoir, I usually tell them that … I definitely encourage them to keep a journal because there were years when I kept journals and then I wouldn’t do it, and I stopped. And I mean, I just wish that I had those journals. They’re just gold. So I think one thing, I think there’s two things about writing about your own life when you’re young. One is that you’re not going to realize how much story you have in your own life, probably until you’re older. Most of my life I was like, my life is boring. I live in this little town. I don’t go anywhere. I don’t do anything. There’s not even a mall here. And then it’s not until 30 years later when I reflect back on it and I’m like, oh my gosh, I had the most interesting childhood.

Look at all these incredible things that happened to me. I had to try out for cheerleader in front of the whole school. At the time, that didn’t seem like a story. Traveling to Europe felt like a story. So I … just collect the things that are happening to you, even if you think it’s not worthy of telling a story. You need to be able to remember those things. But then the other thing too is that I think writing about your own life can also be painful. It can be hard to talk about things when you’re so close to them. So I think journaling helps because nobody’s going to read it and you can get out your feelings. I mean, you need to have some outlet, some way to talk about your feelings when you’re going through something hard. So I think for some people that’s journaling.

And for some people it’s making up fictional stories where you can work things out where it’s not you, because maybe that’s just a little too close. So you really have to, I think time helps you tell your own story. There is no way I could have written The Tryout as a 25 year old. I think I was still too close to it. I think it’s taken all this time for me to be able to see it for what it was, and for some of the things that were painful to not be painful anymore, for me to tackle them.

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To Change A Planet came out of a time of me feeling like really helpless and just doom, like feeling doom and gloom heavily about climate change. And then having this moment of realizing that this problem that seems so overwhelming and so huge is caused by something that’s really small. It’s caused by molecules. It’s almost as small as you can get, but there’s just so many of them. And that’s the same way that we’re going to solve any problem, any problem in the world, whether it’s poverty or climate change, anything that seems overwhelming, it gets tackled by people who are, each one of us, very small, very tiny, but all together we can make a big impact. And when I felt that, I was like, oh, that just clicked to me so much. And the feeling of hopefulness that I felt when I realized that was like, I felt like I had to share that.

So that is the inspiration for the book. And I knew I wanted to write it for something that could be read for really little ones, for families, something that a teacher could read in a class very easily, pick it up and do it as a read aloud very quickly. Because most of the climate change books that were out there at the time, and I think still are very fact heavy and dense. And I just wanted something that felt like a poem and felt light at the end. So that’s where that came from. I wanted the main text to be very lyrical and easily digestible. But then the back matter, I wanted it to be very rich, completely. All of the truth, everything that we know about climate change, like the best sources. So all of that is taken from the intergovernmental panel on climate change, their reports. And so to write the book, I just dug through their reports. They put out these incredible synthesized reports of the latest research of “how do we know the climate is changing?” “How do we know humans are causing it?” “What can we do about it?” “What’s the best?” So I just wanted to give teachers and parents the very best information, but you don’t have to go read those I.P.C.C. reports. So that was a lot of my science museum training coming in there to condense those, to make them even more synthesized for kids.

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Our illustrator for To Change a Planet is Rahele Jomepour Bell, and she, I am, was a huge fan of hers before we knew that she was going to be able to work on it. And, like so often happens when you’re making a picture book, we really did not collaborate, not in the way that I think of co-creating, but there’s a collaboration that takes place just because she’s taking my text and I’m trusting her with bringing it to life. There is some part in the process where my editor and I see sketches and we give feedback, but it’s never about how she’s portraying the text. Like it just, whenever I saw her sketches was just blown away by this world that she creates on the page and how colorful it is, how vivid it is, and just this real sense of … that you get the sense that she loves the planet when she, you’re looking at these images and so I never had any art notes for her whatsoever. Just tiny little things just so that the science was conveyed properly. That’s really it.

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I definitely think that all fantasy writers are, you know, would think that we’re trying to escape this world and we don’t want to think about this world, and that’s why we write fantasy. But I think we do it because we think really deeply about this current world and society that we live in because it’s really, it’s impossible to write fantasy without making some comment on this current world. Because when you’re writing fantasy, you are world building. The story is not taking place in really specific, like 2002 in Austin, Texas or whatever. You’re creating that world and so you have to decide what’s good about it and you have to decide what’s broken in that world. That’s a question I always ask myself whenever I’m writing fantasy is I’ve got this character or this group of characters and whatever they do in this story is going to end up impacting this world in some way. And hopefully since I’m writing for kids and it’s, it’s going to be a hopeful story, it’s going to have a happy ending. Ultimately it’s going to improve the world. So I have to first think about what’s broken in my world and there it’s impossible to do that without reflecting on what’s broken in our world currently. So I have never read a fantasy or even science fiction that isn’t some commentary on human society and people living together. I think it’s impossible.

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So my name is Christina Soontornvat. The Tryout, the beginning of it, you know, you see the first day of school for seventh grade. And so you see Christina going through all of these different classes and the teachers in every class are mispronouncing her or my name are making a little joke about it or saying, I’m not even going to try to pronounce that one. And what I wanted to do with that is show readers right away. First of all, give them a sense of the time period. I think this would be hopefully less acceptable now to treat students like this. Though I know it happens all the time. And also just showing that I was different. I had always had a name that stood out and that people made comments about, but also that for each of those teachers, they thought they were making a funny joke.

And that was the only time that happened to them that day. But I had seven classes that day and it happened every single class. So I think you’d kind of get to see that, okay, these little microaggressions, which is what sometimes they get called, they add up and they accumulate. So it was a good way in the graphic novel to show that. And then you see a flashback where my third grade teacher approaches it very differently. I’m going to try to say your name and I’m sorry if I don’t get it right, but I really want to try. And that was also a way to show that there were people in this small town who were just so inclusive, so kind, so open. And she, I’m going to guarantee I’m the first Thai person she ever met, and that was the first Thai name she ever tried to pronounce. But just how much you can impact someone and make a difference in their life by being kind to them. And that also happened all the time too. So really the book as there was a lot that was challenging. There was a lot of racism, prejudice in the school. But I also really wanted to show how much kindness there was because there’s that too. And that’s the totality of the story, is that all of that existed together.

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The number one question I get from kids at school visits every single time. It’s usually the first question they ask is, are you still friends with Megan, who’s my best friend in the graphic novel? And I tell them that, yes, we’re still friends. And that I text her all the time and she knows about the book. And I showed her the book before it got published and that she was so excited about it. And I think they love hearing that. I think they love knowing that people that they’re friends with now, maybe they’ll still be friends with them 35 years later, but it also, I think shows me that I must have conveyed to them how close we were. I think when I think back about that time, I just think about how important that friendship was for me. And they must have gotten that out of the book, gleaned that from the book, that we were so close and our relationship was so intertwined, which makes me very happy.

Of course. And then what other things do they take away? I mean, they’re all appalled that, oh, we had to try out in front of the whole school, and that students voted on who could make the squad. They can’t believe that we did that. They relate to that. I hear a lot from kids, they’ll come up and say, I ran for student council. They want me to know that they put themselves out there too. And I think that’s a big theme of the book also, is you, gosh, I mean, at that time of your life, you are putting yourself out there every day. Even if you’re not trying out for sports or auditioning for a role in the play or something. I mean, just showing up and going to class at that time of your life, you have got to put on a brave face to just even walk in the door someday of your school. So I hope that comes through too, that they know that we recognize that they’re so brave.

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Being honest and kind of raw about racism and prejudice in our country is really the, it’s like the only way to approach it from all sides, every angle. And I think the important thing for people to know is that kids, young kids in schools today, no matter who they are or where they are very aware. They know about racism, they see it. They … it’s happened to them or to people that they know. They want to talk about it. They are not afraid to talk about it. I think it’s us grownups that get afraid to talk about it, like uncomfortable. We’ve been taught that it’s uncomfortable to talk about, but we’re not going to make any change or any progress if we don’t talk about it. And I think kids are, they are so much more sophisticated, mature, capable of grappling with nuance, nuance of feeling, with empathy than we give them credit for. I just think we do them so much disservice to try to pare things down or cut things out, or hide things from them. You really can’t hide things from them. I mean, think about yourself in middle school and high school. You knew what was up even if nobody was telling you, you knew what was going on.

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The themes that I really wanted to make sure I got right in A Wish in the Dark were the same ones that when I read Les Misérables myself, that I felt changed me. It was one of those books that I felt really changed the way that I look at the world, and it’s just such a gift to have a book like that, right? So one of the things that struck me when I read it first was that people are not what they seem on the outside. So you can look at someone and think that, okay, this person has made mistakes. They’re at this point in their life, you know, look at them from the outside and you’re making a lot of judgements about them. That’s what we do. And you never know their whole story, and if you did, you’d probably change your mind. So that was one theme that I wanted to get into, A Wish in the Dark.

And then the other one was that how much of an impact one person can have on the decades of time and an entire world, which happens in “Les Misérables”. The first part of that book is devoted … you’re kind of reading it and being like, when is the story going to start? Because it’s hundreds of pages that are devoted to this one priest who ends up doing something kind of small to help the main character. Just one little kind, small kind thing that ends up just reverberating through the whole book. And so I remember when I read that as a teenager, thinking like, okay, this is a Christian priest, but he could also be a Buddhist monk. There’s just so much about him that he could be anyone. He was just such a wonderful, good, and kind person. So that theme also went into A Wish in the Dark. So there’s a monk, a Buddhist monk in the story who does some small things that end up having this huge impact on the story.

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“The Last Mapmaker.” Most of it takes place on the sea on a ship, and I have always loved stories that are like that. One of my favorites as a kid was “The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle”. That is just was one of my forever favorite books. I just felt like Charlotte was my best friend. I was Charlotte Doyle and, you know, I think there’s something about it that is just so great for exploring the inner turmoils of the heart because you’re on this ship, it’s close quarters with these people going to, you know, who can you trust? Who do you want to be with? Who are you aligned with? There’s always alliances breaking and mutinies, but then you can’t escape. There’s nowhere to go, and the ocean is out there and it is going to expose you for who you really are. Your true self cannot hide on the ocean, which I just think is, it’s a great setting for drama, for intense drama.

So yeah, the world building for it. It’s funny because I wrote this, rewrote this book a lot, and this was the second novel I ever tried to write. And at first I said it in a world that was Dickinson England. Because as I’ve talked about, it’s very hard to break away from those implicit messages that we get soon about, okay, where should a story take place if you’re setting a story on a sailing ship? What has to be a British sailing ship? So that was the first iteration of “The Last Mapmaker”. So completely rewrote the whole thing, stripped it down to just its very barest themes and ideas. Rewrote the main character and the main character became girl. Lots of different reasons for that. So when she became a girl, there were all of these moments there … It was just like I had to reexamine everything.

Who … the gender equity of this world. I had to go back in and look at it and just kind of decided, well, why does the captain of the ship have to be a man? Why isn’t the captain a woman and why isn’t the ruler of the kingdom? … why do … she should be a queen? And maybe this is a world where that’s not even questioned. So that was really fun to write where it’s never a question of like, oh, is she good enough to be the captain? It’s just like you know right away she is the most coolest, wickedest awesomest captain that there ever was, and that was really fun to do. But still, that doesn’t absolve just because we switch it to being women in roles of power that doesn’t absolve them of mistakes that they’re making. Those mistakes are human mistakes. So that was fun to write too.

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I’m reading from The Last Mapmaker and in this scene the main character Sai is just learning that there is this expedition that’s being planned. So Sai is an apprentice to a map maker and he’s been acting funny. Everyone in the town has been acting funny, they’re whispering about things. She can’t figure out what it’s about. So she’s gotten her hand on a newspaper and she finds a proclamation, a royal proclamation printed in the newspaper and it says her Royal Majesty Queen Siripatra announces the expedition prize adventure to extend the boundaries and glory of the kingdom of Mangkon. The queen has commissioned her Royal Navy’s finest ships for the expeditions captained by the heroes of the longest war. These ships shall sail for all corners of the globe to claim new lands in her name. Her Royal Majesty has directed four of her best captains to set their sights for the deepest sea in the north, the lands east of the hinder range west past Rotan.

And to break the 50th parallel in the South, each captain who returns with a map of their discoveries shall be awarded a purse of 100,000 leks. So leks is their currency. 100,000 leks. My head swam at the number. Mangkon must have done better in the war than I thought. I knew the names of those destinations from the maps hanging in our shop. Master Paiyoon had charted those places, but only barely. It was if the queen were sending her ships out to the very borders of his maps and ordering them to peak past the edges of the paper. There was no mention in the newspaper of the Sandlands, despite what the people in the street were saying. And why would there be that place was a myth. I combed through my memory for the few scraps of stories I had heard about it. It was a continent floating on the back of a giant whale in the deep southern seas. Or was it a group of islands rooted to the ocean floor like a manor tree. It was covered in icy mountains or was it smothered by steamy jungle, home to spirits, home to dragons. So these are all the things she’s thinking about and she’s doesn’t know it yet. But here’s a spoiler, she’s going to end up on one of those expeditions.

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When I was watching the mainstream media cover the story, there were just so many times where I noticed the American media kind of misrepresenting something or not getting it. Just so many examples, not understanding the religion, making fun, a little bit of the way that families would leave offerings and pray to this princess, this goddess of the cave. Guess goddess is not the right word, but her spirit, and just not being as respectful as they could. But also other things like the way that the boys responded when the rescue divers came in to help them, and how the boys were very calm and not seeming to get upset. And so the American media kind of acted like, oh, these funny boys, they weren’t even upset about anything because they were smiling. And I just, that was a misunderstanding of Thai culture, which is that you, they’re trying to be respectful by not showing they’re upset, and of course they’re upset, and of course they’re so terrified and overwhelmed and emotional, but they’re not going to show that to British diver because it’s not appropriate, and that would reflect badly on them, so it’s on them and their family.

So it was things like that that I felt like, okay, oh, when I write this, I have so much to say that’s going to help you understand it. If you don’t know what Thai culture is like that I felt just had to go in there. That’s part of understanding the story just as much as knowing the facts, the facts about the rescue.

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For writing All Thirteen. I went to the location of the cave. I went to that town and spent about 10 days interviewing people who had been there from the first day. And I did talk to the divers, to the rescue divers, talk to the military people who are involved in that. But I think the most important people that I talk to are kind of just regular volunteers because they were, I think what people forget about it is that this happened in a really small town. And in a small town, everyone knows each other. So these rescuers were just regular people, business owners or workers in the community who volunteered to come and help out in any way they could. And then they know those boys and they know the families. So it’s getting all these incredible stories and they’re just so invested in it emotionally.

I just could never have written it without talking to them in person. I did those interviews about two months, two and a half months after the rescue was wrapped up. So enough time where people could articulate what happened. They had … stuff had sunk in, but close enough where they were still so emotional about it. Just had people who were crying talking about it, where they would pinch their arm and be like, or just go like, “boo, I can’t believe we did that.” So I think that’s, people talk about how the story was very tense and it was very intense to read, even though from the beginning that they’re all going to live. And I think the reason is because that’s how I felt when those people were telling me their stories. They were … they knew the rescue was over and it was successful, but they just still couldn’t believe it. They were still shocked and nervous when they were telling their stories. So I felt like I had to convey that in my writing.

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There’s so much science, so much engineering in the story. I mean, I think that’s another reason I was drawn to it. But I mean, when I incorporated that, I felt like it added to the drama, it added to your ability to get immersed in the story. Because if you know what diving does to your body, if you know what starvation does to your body or how the limestone rock in this cave reacts to a monsoon flood and what all of the science factors are, it amps up the tension in the story. If you understand that. To me, it’s just opens it up, makes it more of a rich story. So that’s kind of how I approach that was like, it’s not just something on the side to know. It’s really going to make you feel like you were there. If you know these things

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