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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