I think it’s really important in historical fiction to see that these people aren’t necessarily actors on a distant stage, but you literally take each reader and bring them up on stage, so they almost feel like a participant.
When I was a kid, there really weren’t any books about Chinese-Americans I really respect. There weren’t any books, literally. And so as a kid, the librarians would try and get me interested in their hot properties. And this will date me. But, you know, they would try to get me to read Homer Price and his Donut Machine. And my problem is all the kids in Homer Price – they all had bicycles, and they all left their front doors unlocked. And nobody I knew had a bicycle. Nobody certainly, nobody left their door unlocked…
I lived in an Afro-American neighborhood, and I went to school in Chinatown. And so the books that I really found true to my own life were fantasy and science-fiction, because in those books you have children from an ordinary world, ordinary place taken to another world, where they have to learn strange, new customs and a strange, new language. So, those books talked about adapting. And that’s something I did every time I got on and off the bus.
