[Music] I'm going to bet that one of the first things you did today was to look out the window maybe you looked just to check the weather maybe you looked to see the sun but what you really saw was the world that's what a book does a book can show you the world but here's the thing about your window when the light hits it just right you don't just see the world outside you can also see your reflection so the window becomes a mirror that's also what a book does a book can show you the
world but it can also show you a reflection of yourself but what happens if you never see anyone in a book that looks like you when I was a child there were two things everyone knew about me one was that I loved books and the other was that I was Asian everyone knew I was Asian because well look at me my family was one of the few Asian families in our town so that meant that except for my sisters I was the only Asian girl in my elementary school and I did not like that I
decided early on that I was just going to pretend that I wasn't Asian I refused used to learn Chinese I ate McDonald's and I curled my hair I remember in third grade I was walking down the street and I saw my reflection in a store window and I said hm there's a Chinese girl there and then I thought oh wait that's me I had spent so much time pretending that I wasn't Asian that I really did forget that I was and in a lot of ways it was really easy to forget it seemed like there
was nobody that looked like me anywhere there was nobody that looked like me in school there was nobody that looked like me in the movies there was nobody that looked like me on TV or in the magazines and most importantly there was nobody that looked like me in the books that I loved in fact the only book I ever saw with an Asian person in it was this one one day my Elementary School librarian took this book out and she said today we're going to read the five Chinese brothers and all of my classmates turned
to me and said Chinese just like you have you ever been horrified by your own reflection in a mirror because that is how I felt every time I was reminded of my ethnicity in fifth grade my class decided to put on the Play Return to Oz and all the girls wanted to be Dorothy me included so all the girls every day at recess all the girls who wanted to be Dorothy would stand in a circle and we would all sing some Over the Rainbow over and over again practicing for the audition until on the day
of the audition I turned to the girl next to me and I said today is the audition do you think they might choose me to be Dorothy and she looked at me and she said but you can't be Dorothy Dorothy's not Chinese and when she said this I felt so so stupid it was that horrible embarrassment where you get hot and red and sticky as if even your skin is crying tiny boiling tears it's that feeling when someone says to you who do you think you are and you feel like you are nobody I felt
like I was nobody I felt like I could never be Dorothy I could never be anyone important like that but I still loved books I loved books so much that I even made books in my spare time just for fun some were magical adventures some were fairy tales but the heroins were never ever Asian this love of making books stayed with me so much that As I Grew Older I decided that I wanted to be a children's book author and illustrator I went to art school and I even studied in Rome Italy there in Rome
I drew and painted the landscape and the architecture and many more pictures of beautiful fairy tale princesses but one day I was at a cafe with an Italian and he turned to me and said so you're Chinese how do you say coffee in Chinese and I told him that I was American and I didn't know how to say anything in Chinese as I explained it to him he nodded but he was still pretty confused and he said so your parents moov from Taiwan to the United States why and it was then that I realized I
did not know the answer I realized that here I was in Rome having a conversation in Italian yet I could not speak one word of my parents mother tongue I realized that I could tell him how long it took Michelangelo to paint the cinee chapel I could tell him what the mascot of Rome was I could tell him how ancient Italians dyed their hair but I could not tell him why my own parents immigrated to the United States of America and for the first time I was ashamed for the right reasons because here I was
trying to be an artist and when you're trying to be an artist what you're really doing is trying to create a vision to share with the world but how could I create any Vision to share with the world when I had never even looked at myself it was an epiphany after a lifetime of denying my Heritage I was suddenly starved for it I began to look at Chinese art and I fell in love with Chinese folk art especially its bright colors and patterns and I began to paint the same way and when my books were
finally published they featured Chinese culture and Asian characters teachers always tell you to write what you know but I wasn't doing that I was writing what I wanted to know because my books are the books that I wished I had when I was a child and knowing this I really should not have been surprised when people called my novel where the mountain meets the moon a Chinese Wizard of Oz because the main character minlee who's on this journey to find the old man of the Moon well minlee she's really an Asian Dorothy a girl that
my fifth grade self would have loved to see himself as where the mountain meets the moon won a Newberry honor which is kind of like being nominated for an Oscar and because of this the readership exploded teachers put the book on their summer reading lists C communities read it and you wouldn't believe how many kids sent me letters telling me how much they loved it schools even produce plays of it with my Asian Dorothy becoming a coveted character in fact a third grade teacher told me that they ended up having four different minle because so
many kids wanted to be her can you imagine that can you imagine creating a character because you felt like an outcast only to hear that that character was whom everyone wished to be it was amazing and surreal and the surprises continued because of the book's popularity Librarians from all over the world from Iowa to Hong Kong invited me to speak to their students and it was at one of these schools that a librarian took me aside and she said I have to tell you this year we had a new new student an Asian girl and
I'm ashamed to say that some of the kids made fun of her but after we read your book all of a sudden all the kids thought that being Asian was kind of cool it really made them look at her in a different light and this made me realize that as much as kids need books to be mirrors kids also need books to be Windows kids who always see themselves in books need to be able to see things from other viewpoints how can we expect kids to get along with others in this world to empathize and
to share if they never see outside of themselves because if they did don't you think that the girl who stood next to me in fifth grade might have answered a little differently don't you think she could have said sure you could be Dorothy why not so tonight when you go home please look at your child's bookshelf are all the books mirrors or are they all windows make sure that you have both because if you do you're setting a path path for self-worth and empathy and that is a brick road worth following [Applause] [Music]
