For me, Qian represents the self and the precocious, mischievous child who went from knowing only love and acceptance to living in daily shame and hu… - Qian Julie Wang

The act of processing the memories I had suppressed for decades had freed me to see not just younger me, but the younger versions of my mother and father in their full dimensions. That in turn allowed me to honour everything we had been and had experienced—both the good and the bad.

I always wanted to share my story, even when I wasn’t talking about the past and didn’t tell anyone that I was undocumented. I always felt that I had this story burning inside me and it was frustrating to have it pent up in there. It was growing inside me and gnawing at my consciousness, so I think it needed to take this long for this book to come out and if I waited longer, it probably would have come out in a different form.

In books, both fiction and nonfiction, what matters is not what happens in the book but how is it is told. By virtue of living, we experience facets of the human experience. How we experience those facets and what we take away from them are both fascinating because they are uniquely ours (because there is no other person exactly like each of us on the planet, and no one who will respond exactly the same way) and because it is universally human. Thus, it does not so much matter what you write about, but how you choose to write and what messages you share. To aspiring writers: I hope you will remember that there is magic and beauty in your experiences and perspectives simply because they are yours.