LeUyen Pham

LeUyen Pham:
I just always felt like I was better understood visually on the page than even standing in front of someone. I have always found that the world is much, much kinder to art.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
LeUyen Pham's art is her language. It's the way she speaks to the world. But as an artist, she's resisted developing a single trademark style, nor does she link most of her work to her own personal history and identity. She wants the work to speak for itself.

LeUyen Pham:
There's something very lovely about feeling like, well, it's not my name, and it's not me, it's just the books.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
LeUyen has built an incredibly large and diverse portfolio of work across the spectrums of style and genre. She has illustrated over 130 books, including Bear Came Along, for which she received a Caldecott honor, The Princess in Black series, a fan favorite, the Alvin Ho series, and one of my kids' favorite growing up Grace for President, and just so many more. She's even penned some books of her own, including the award-winning Outside, Inside, an evocative depiction of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this episode, LeUyen talks about why she prefers to be an art chameleon, how support from her teachers led her to her career in art, and how she approaches diversity in her work. She also shares the story of why there are no names on the cover of Bear Came Along. My name is Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and this is The Reading Culture. A show where we speak with authors and illustrators about ways to build a stronger culture of reading in our communities. We dive into their personal experiences, their inspirations, and why their stories and ideas motivate kids to read more. Make sure to check us out on Instagram for giveaways at The Reading Culture Pod, and you can also subscribe to our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter. All right. On to the show.

So you were born in Vietnam, is that right?

LeUyen Pham:
Yes.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And when did you move here? Your parents are refugees?

LeUyen Pham:
Mm-hmm. We're all refugees. My mom was pregnant with my youngest brother and I came with my two brothers and my sister and I was a year and a half when we left Vietnam. I think we were one of the first Vietnamese families to be placed in the Southern California area, or at least in Temple City. I remember seeing a newspaper article where they showed Vietnamese refugees celebrate Christmas, and there's a picture of my mom and my dad and all of us. My mom's pregnant and all of us as little kids just frowning into the camera and not understanding what Christmas was and what we were doing, and just happy to get presents I guess. That was in 1975. 1975.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And then did you stay living in that area in Temple City?

LeUyen Pham:
Yeah. I went all the way through high school. We all grew up there and then graduated from school there.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
What was that community like at the time?

LeUyen Pham:
It was an amazing community, I got to say. In my memory of it ... And maybe I'm sugarcoating it, maybe I'm just ... It's been years. Maybe the United States has gone a strange way and now I understand what a really bad community might be, but I personally felt like all my brothers and sisters and I, we did very, very well growing up there. And we were not wealthy. We were really on the edge of poverty. But for all of that, Temple City, I think as far as the education was concerned, as far as the teachers, I can only ever remember my teachers being the most encouraging people ever. Maybe it's because we were one of the first refugee families.

The community themselves ... Temple City had a Catholic community that welcomed a lot of people and they were the ones that helped us find a house. They helped my father get a job. They donated a ton of things to us when we first came there. All of our clothes and all of our furniture, everything was just donated. And so I always felt like we were, not taken care of but cared for. And it's not that the teachers were kind to everybody, but I felt like I had a particular affinity with almost every teacher that I had. I don't know if it was because I drew all the time, if I was a really good student ... And I taught myself to read when I was five, so I was probably a pleasure to have in class. But I just always remember my teachers being the ones that would encourage me artistically and would say over and over, "Oh, you're such a good artist. You should be an artist when you grow up." The librarians would always find me really great books with illustrations in it to show me what was possible out there.

I remember in sixth grade, my school had a book contest where they would have an art contest, and if you won the art contest, if it was a poster or a bookmark whatnot, you would get money to buy books at the book fair, which was great because I never had enough money to do that. And one year in sixth grade, the prize was also to meet with the illustrator, Bill Peet. He animated The Tawny Scrawny Lion and all those '60s really funny goofy shorts. He ended his career just doing tons and tons of children's books.

My teacher, I remember Mrs. Turner, she said, "I want you to meet him and I want you to show him some of your stuff." In my head, I could only hear my parents' voice, which was, "We came here from Vietnam. You're going to get a real job. You're going to be a lawyer. Your sister's going to be a doctor. Your brother's going to be an engineer." So I just never had that in my head. The idea that you could be a creative person in any way. And I met with Bill Peet and he was this lovely man and he showed me his work and he looked at my stuff and he said, "Yeah, you're very good. You're 11. You should really think about doing this." And I looked at him and I thought, "How do you even do this?" And he said, "You can make a living out of this. And in fact, what happens is doing art isn't a job, doing art is just your life that you get paid for." I think that's when that idea first clicked in my head that there was that possibility. And I started paying closer attention to my teachers when they really would push me to try these more artistic routes in life.

I still ended up going to UCLA. I was studying poli-sci when I was at UCLA. I was on that track. And again, it took a teacher changing that track for me at UCLA. The head of the art department there I had talked to him about a problem that I was having in a class. I think the issue was that he ... He didn't accuse me, but I thought he accused me of copying a drawing. And he came and he said, "Hey, where did you copy this?" And I didn't realize he was talking about a master copy. When you go to the museum and you sketch something. I took it badly. I thought that he was accusing me of copying. So I went to the head of the art department and he looked at the drawing and he said, "Well, what else do you have? Can you show me more?" And again, I took it badly. This is why I should have been a lawyer, because I take everything wrong.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
You're ready to defend yourself. Like yes, I do.

LeUyen Pham:
Yeah. Exactly. This terribly unjust of view. What are you talking about? I was so annoyed. I went home and I found all of these drawings I'd done when I was a high schooler and I dumped it on his desk and said, "Here. These are the things that I've done. I'm dropping the class." And then the next day he called me and he said, "LeUyen, I've made an appointment for you at the Art Center College of Design. You do not belong at this school. You belong in an art school and go meet with this counselor and you're getting out of here." And that was it. It changed everything. I switched to Art Center College. The more I tell the story, the more I realize how unusual and how fairy tale like this story is. But it's absolutely what happened.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's so crazy.

LeUyen Pham:
Yeah.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Just to see it and be like, no, you're going to go here.

LeUyen Pham:
It was great. And I have to say, when I started at Art Center, I say this all the time, it was feeling like I was in my own skin for the first time ever.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh, that's so amazing. Yeah. I think that's also the first time that you actually started going by LeUyen. Is that right? Can you tell me that story of how that came to be?

LeUyen Pham:
It's actually pronounced LeUyen but Uyen is very, very hard to say with the Western tongue. So even my family calls me Winn more than Uyen. My mother's the only one that calls me correctly. But when I was in kindergarten, everybody called me Winn and then Winnie. And then in second grade I switched schools and the kids were learning how to read so they could see that there was an L-E in front of my name and so they stuck it in there, LeUyen, LeUyen, LeUyen, LeUyen. And kids have lazy tongues and it turned into Lee Wan, Lee Wan, Lee Wan, and then it turned into Lian. And there are still some people that I know, like a couple of people who remember me from the hybrid state where they would call me Wian instead of Lian because they would combine the Winn and the Lian.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Wow.

LeUyen Pham:
Yeah, it's really, really funny. And so by the time I was nine, I was officially Lian and I stayed Lian all the way through high school. And then when I got to college, the very first TA that I had was a Vietnamese woman and she pronounced my name correctly and I just went back to Winn.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
How did that feel?

LeUyen Pham:
Because my family at home still called me Winn, it just felt like, oh, okay, this is normal.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This is actually my name. This is my name.

LeUyen Pham:
This is my name. But that's a whole huge part of your life that you're Lian.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah. Yeah. You go off to college and you adapt a new identity and you try to be something new. I think I just went back to my old identity and a lot of my friends who called me Lian, they had to switch over to Win, and I would say it's true, "Why did you call me Lian all those years? I didn't even choose it myself."

"'I hate it here,' she confessed. 'I don't belong. They don't want me. Aunt Rachel would I know, but she has too many worries. Uncle Matthew hates me. Mercy is wonderful and Judith tries to be friendly, but I'm just a trouble to them all. Everything I do and say is wrong.' So they came to the meadow, said Hannah, patting the girl's hand with her small gnarled claw. What went so wrong this morning? She listened, nodding her head like a wizened owl as the tale of the morning's woes came pouring out. As Kit reached the part about the schoolmaster and his cane to her amazement, a rusty chuckle interrupted her. Hannah's face had crumpled into a thousand gleeful wrinkles. Kit hesitated and all at once, the memory struck her funny too. Her breath caught tremulously and then she was laughing with Hannah. But instantly she sobered again, 'What am I to do now?', she pleaded. 'How can I ever go back and face them?'

"Hannah said nothing for quite a long time. Her faded eyes studied the girls beside her, and now there was nothing childlike in that wise kindly gaze. 'Come,' she said. 'I have something to show thee.' Outside the house against a sheltered wall to the south, a single stalk of green thrust upwards with slender rapier-like leaves and one huge scarlet blossom. Kit went down on her knees. 'It looks just like the flowers at home,' she marveled. 'I didn't know you had such flowers here.' 'It came all the way from Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope,' Hannah told her. 'My friend brought the bulb to me. A little brown thing, like an onion. I doubted it would grow here, but it just seemed determined to keep on trying. And look what has happened.' Kit glanced up suspiciously. Was Hannah trying to preach to her? But the old lady merely poked gently at the earth around the alien plant. 'I hope my friend will come while it is still blooming,' she said. 'He'll be so pleased.' 'I must go now,' Kit said, getting to her feet. Then something prompted her to add honestly, 'You've given me an answer, haven't you? I think I know what you mean.' The woman shook her head. 'The answer is in thy heart,' she said softly. 'Thee can always hear it if thee listens for it.'"

LeUyen's relationships with her teachers were a vital part of her development. Not only as an artist, but also as a young girl trying to find her place in a country far from her first home. On fitting into her new home, there is one teacher in particular that LeUyen remembers fondly. Miss Sangren.

LeUyen Pham:
She was from the south. She had this lilt to her voice so when she read she had that really ... It was almost like honey dripping off a spoon. It was really lovely.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
The passage you heard LeUyen read is from a 1958 novel that Miss Sangren gave her called the Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. It's really a reminder that the connection we build with each other by sharing books is unmatched. Our experiences with books are so personal, so twined with our internal world that when someone hands you a book and says, "I think this will resonate with you," it's really a way of them saying, I see you.

LeUyen Pham:
In this book. This main character is a girl named Kit, and she comes from Barbados, from the colony of Barbados. She's of British descent, but she's lived this wild life on the beach and she lived with her grandfather who gave her all this freedom. She loved to read and she just led this unleashed life. And then her grandfather dies and she's forced to come to the American colonies and she's forced to live with this very puritanical family. And she is responding to it, not happily, but she is teaching a class with her cousin Mercy and something goes terribly wrong and she feels like she's disappointed everyone. And she runs off into the moors, into this marshy, swampy area where an old woman named Hannah lives, who everybody believes is a witch. When she gave it to me, she would always talk to me. And I think maybe it was because she was from the south and she felt a little out of place in Southern California.

But she would say to me, "Winn, I know that you're not from here and I know that sometimes you feel like you're not quite at home, you're not quite comfortable where you are so I thought you would really like this book because it's about this girl named Kit who comes from India." And I thought in my mind that she was Indian. So in my mind, Kit is actually from Barbados of Indian descent, not British colonists. Anyway. But she said, "She's very much like you. She's a wild flower that needs to be planted in a new space and you don't belong here, but you can still grow here." And she was just amazing. I just loved her so much. And I read every book that she gave me and the Witch of Blackbird Pond was just one that just really affected the way, I guess a lot of those roots of determination maybe come from these heroines that she depicted from the books.

I'm realizing now I'm probably the age she was when she gave me the book and just reading that word, this little brown bulb, this little brown onion. And that's probably what I look like to her, this little brown thing that just was trying so hard to grow and to thrive and to make it somewhere. I can just feel all that compassion from her going to that younger version of myself. There's so much meaning behind it, but I'm touched so much by that thought. That connection that this woman from the South made with this girl from the other side of the world in such an amazing way.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Oh my God, I have chills just thinking about that and just the power of that one book and how that can impact a kid. Okay. So thinking about that experience, but also how she and other teachers really encouraged you to draw and commit yourself to your art, did you feel also like you were finding your own way to belonging, your path to belonging through art when you were younger?

LeUyen Pham:
Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's not necessarily hiding behind your art, but it's putting yourself through your art. I just always felt like I was better understood visually on the page than even standing in front of someone. I have always found that the world is much, much kinder to art. I spent a lot of my 20s traveling around the world. And while I used to hate the way my face looked in that Vietnamese people couldn't tell that I was Vietnamese right away because my grandfather is French and so I've got the bigger eyes and I've got a bigger nose and I don't quite look the way other Vietnamese people look. So Vietnamese never quite let me into their circle in the same way. They would think I was from another culture. They would think I was Hispanic, Filipino, whatever. I used to not like that as a kid. But in my 20s I loved it. I loved that I could go to Morocco, tan within a week and then be considered Moroccan. I loved that I could travel to Germany and my skin would get very, very light and people would think I was Turkish or Italian or French. It's just everywhere I went, I could adapt to a different identity. And people would receive me, not necessarily as an American if they didn't hear me speak, but they wouldn't know where I was coming from.

And all it would take to get kindness would be to pull out my sketchbook and to start drawing. And everywhere I went, it just dropped the boundaries right away. I would go to Asia. And in Asia you have these little kids who would wait until the people get off the bus and they try to sell them water and they try to sell them souvenirs. And they know those three words in English. Water, water. Buy, buy here. And I would come off and all these tourists would be surrounded with their little cameras and I would go with my sketchbook and sit down and those kids would suddenly stop being salesmen and become kids and they would come and sit down next to me and I wouldn't be able to speak to them, they wouldn't be able to speak to me. But sketching, drawing is its own language and they would just sit next to me. I would tear out a piece of paper, I would hand them a pen, they would do a drawing for me. I would do a drawing of them. We would swap drawings.

I have all these sketchbooks from when I traveled around the world where I've got pictures of kids and kids have done drawings for me. It's just a way of communicating without words. It's communicating through art. And that is a gift I had not anticipated from drawing. It really, really does break down boundaries in a way that nothing else in this world can do. Just communicating through pictures. It's amazing. It's amazing. That's what I do for a living.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
On her travels, it appealed to LeUyen that people couldn't easily pin down her ethnicity. This meant she wasn't easily prejudged or pigeonholed into a stereotype. And perhaps unsurprisingly, she would adopt a very similar approach in her profession. LeUyen built a career as an art chameleon, avoiding a single style or branded identity. Her illustrations for one book might be reminiscent of Sendak's classic Little Bear illustrations for the next, she might work in realism with a hint of Norman Rockwell and yet another might be done in Dick and Jane style vignettes with black line work and flat vintage colors. She resisted easy classification and it made for a wonderfully varied portfolio, but it also made things a bit more difficult starting out.

LeUyen Pham:
I'm not a terribly well-known name in the way that a lot of people are in the children's book world. I think teachers and librarians know me because they've seen my books. And then in the publishing world, I'm very well-known because I'm very good at hitting deadlines, which is rare for an illustrator. But I think to the common public, because I never came out with a really huge book from the beginning ... I don't write a whole lot of my own books, which is a way that you get well-known in the industry. There's something in that, I just do so many varieties of books and I'm constantly jumping from idea and style and subject matter. I do board books and then I do picture books and I do chapter books. And because of that, I never really had something to rest my name behind. And so I was very slow in being noticed for the Caldecott for awards, but I never really cared.

And I was once at Books of Wonder and there was this panel of ... Everybody was a Caldecott winner, and this was before I won the Caldecott honor. And I was on there because I was friends with so many people. And everyone went up and everyone could pronounce everyone's name and the whole audience would recognize them and kids would hold up the book. And then I went up and I said, "Yeah, I'll bet no one out there can pronounce my name." And crickets in the audience. And then I said, "But I'll bet if I listed off 10 of my books and you raised your hand, if you got it, you'll all either know my books or you'll have my books at home." And I listed off 10 books. And by the eighth book, I think everybody in the room had raised their hand. So they all had my books at home.

And so there's something very lovely about feeling like, well, it's not my name and it's not me, it's just the books. And it feels like I'm not an artist that has to be attached to my work for the book to be recognized. And somehow it fits with my personality. I really like that. I like that I don't have to have anything to do with it, that you actually can just take the book at face value and enjoy it for what it is and not because it's your favorite illustrator of all time.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In one of your interviews I heard you say that I could just take my name off the front of the book. I'd be happy to just not have it there at all. Do you really feel that way? Do you really feel like you just want the art in the world?

LeUyen Pham:
You've seen the cover of Bear Came Along?

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

LeUyen Pham:
My name name is not on there.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Yeah.

LeUyen Pham:
Yeah. It's weird, but my name is such a strange thing. It can be a handicap and it can be a huge plus. It's a handicap in that when Western eyes look at it, they have a very hard time pronouncing it. And I've just noticed that if you can't pronounce someone's name, you're hesitant to say it and therefore you're hesitant to bring it up in conversation. And I'm going to guess that in the publishing world, it makes you hesitant to suggest the name if you can barely pronounce the name. It's a bit of a handicap in that way. It was a plus though too, because when people look at it, they couldn't tell if I was a man or a woman. For the longest time it was a great experiment to see, can you figure out if I'm a man or woman just by looking at my art. Which the experiment is over.

There was a point where I just felt like my name wasn't of a benefit to me anymore. I was getting known in a particular way, in a particular style, and I didn't want that. And I wanted to see if I could just get out there without my name attached in any way and see if the book would still sell. So when Bear Came Along came about, that was one of the first books I ever did where I got the script and I just knew exactly what it was supposed to look like. I had every image in my head the minute I read it. I talked with my editor on that Alvina Ling at Little Brown. And she was great. I think only a big time editor can do this. But she agreed with everything I came up with. It was like a two-page manuscript. It was barely 500 words, the entire book, but I turned it into a really long book.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
That's a long book.

LeUyen Pham:
She went for it. Yeah. She had no problem with that. And every design challenge that I put up there, she would fight me a little and then she'd just let me have it. Things like text running across the entire double page spread rather than left, right, left. She would push me and then she's like, "You know what? It's your book. Let's do it." And then everything from where the page would turn and then three spreads with no words in it, no one gets that. And she just said, "Go for it. It's yours." So when it came time for the cover, I had the cover designed so clear in my mind and all I could think was my name is just not going to fit. And just what I saw for the cover, I just couldn't make it work without compromising some design element on the cover. So I told her, "Look, I know I can't get the author to take his name off, but I'm begging you, please don't make me put my name on it. It'll just look so much better."

And I sent her the sketch just as it was, and I didn't hear from her for maybe two weeks. And then she wrote back, "Not only do you not have to put your name on it, but Richard agrees with you, let's not put the name on the cover." So he didn't put his name on it either, which I thought, it was just amazing that your egos get dropped and you can see the vision of what the book is supposed to be and it has nothing to do with your name or your credentials or your anything. And it just has to do with the face of the book facing the audience on the library bookshelf or on the bookstore shelf. That was amazing.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
I have read that you ... I wrote it down so I didn't forget it. You said, "My career has been devoted to drawing the world as I would like to see it." And in that case you were saying, but in this case, I drew it as it actually was. But I was curious about that statement and how that shows itself in your work.

LeUyen Pham:
I've been doing books for a really long time. My first book came out when I was 24. The industry was different back then. I don't even think the term people of color was a term yet. And diverse books was not even something that was in the mainstream in any way. And the only Asian illustrator I ever remember seeing was Allen Say, and all of his books had Asian themes to it. And I loved his books and I loved his watercolors. But I remember at the time I wanted to see Allen Say do a book about a flying car driven by an elephant, and never happened. It was just not going to happen. He did My Grandfather's Journey. And all of his books, they were beautiful and they were very, very moving and they were poignant, but they always circled around the theme of being Asian and being an outsider and finding a way to fit in or introducing some Asian myth to Western eyes. And it felt so narrow to me, that path of storytelling. So I never wanted to be identified in one way.

And this is going to be a little controversial, but I was a Cosby kid. I grew up watching the Cosby Show. I'm so sad about how that whole affair has turned out, but I took all those great lessons. And I loved watching the show because you saw a wide variety of kids on that show, and they just seemed to belong there. There was no question. It looked like Sesame Street every Thursday evening. And I think I loved those images so much because it just looked like a rainbow of people all the time. And so when I first started doing books, I did a lot of animal books initially. And when I transitioned over to people books, I think my editors ... Again, they didn't know I was a woman. They didn't really know what my nationality was so they were odd about sending me certain scripts. And the first couple of scripts that I got, they weren't specific race-based books, which I was glad about. And I'm not going to mention what the book is, but I did do ... One of my early, early picture books, had a little boy in it, and I immediately pictured my neighbor next door in Oakland and my editor pushed back and she's like, "I don't think the author was seeing this kid as a black kid." And here is how naive I was at the time. I had no understanding of what she was trying to say. All I could think was is she picturing a real kid? Because I don't know what's in her head.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Okay.

LeUyen Pham:
Yeah. And I just kept going forward. It took a while before I realized, oh, that's what she's inferring. That's what she means. I don't know if it's a sign that I was either terribly naive or maybe just very progressive and didn't realize it. But because it took a while, I didn't push necessarily. I just didn't give her what she wanted and then submitted the book and then I don't know what the author thought, but then the book won a couple awards and the author got noted for being this ... Wow, she's a white woman. And she wrote about ... I just laughed and I thought, well, that's great. That's the way you're supposed to paint the world and that's how I thought that I just wanted to make the world the way I wanted it to be. It wasn't necessarily that the world was like that. It was this world that if you plant this into kids' heads, this is their first vision of what the world is. These picture books. And there is nothing between a kid and a picture book. The space between them, it's as if a picture book is just a reflection of what's in that child's brain.

And if those first images that get into their brain are wildly diverse, then it's going to create a wildly diverse kid. That was my intention always with books. And so I always focused on just putting a huge variety of races and nationalities and skin color. And artistically speaking, it's fun to paint different colored skin. It's just much more interesting and it looks more beautiful on the page. So it was never this grand intention, it was just this artistic desire to just do what felt right. And I remember years later, Ellen Oh contacted me because We Need Diverse Books was just starting. She and an editor from Chronicle Books asked, I would be willing to use any of my art because I had so many books at that point with so many diverse characters and the term diversity was starting to become a thing. And I remember always laughing at that term because I just thought that term is just so ... It almost has no meaning to me because I was living in this world for such a long time.

So I just told them, pick whatever book you want. Take any character you want out of it. You know what I find really interesting about that too is that when diversity in books started to become really big, and then they started to create sensitivity readers, and then suddenly everything was up to examination and all this freedom that I used to experience with just having fun and putting things in and trying to show a variety of the world was suddenly becoming into sharp focus. And I remember having a little bit of difficulty adjusting to that because I needed to make sure that what I was doing and representing was proper and right. And I would feel like I was being put through the wringer in a lot of ways. And I realized so much of that is a response to this desire for the publishing world to orchestrate the audience's response to things, which you cannot do. You cannot predict how anyone is going to respond to a piece of work.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
In 2023, LeUyen directly reflected her personal identity through her work. Lunar New Year Love Story is a graphic novel she illustrated alongside writer Gene Yang. Because of how closely she worked with Gene on it. The story is full of insight into LeUyen's own experiences, although it wasn't entirely intentional.

LeUyen Pham:
Gene is one of those great writers that you want to work with because you know he's very thoughtful about everything he does. But I think what I love the most about Gene is that he established himself with this groundbreaking work with American Born Chinese and made these very clear, sometimes not so clear statements about what it feels like to be an Asian American and the trauma that sometimes you don't realize that it's been inflicted on you in trying to understand your place in a western society with an Eastern background. So he's gone through those channels many, many, many times. And I think when he sent the script over what appealed to me immediately was the fact that it's incidental that the characters are Asian. It's just a really great story and it's a very sweet love triangle. And the trials that the main character Val goes through is something that everybody goes through. And her background, the fact that she's Vietnamese American, just gives it more layers to the story. Just adds another layer of depth to it that it might not otherwise have.

And my appeal to the story was on that was that I recognized the love story and I could tell immediately what this character needed and who she was. And when we first got the script in fact, the character Val wasn't even Vietnamese. I think she was Filipino. And Gene and I went back and forth and I swapped a lot of stories with him and he stole a lot of my story. So I can say there's a lot of me in the book. So when we went back and forth about who the character should be, I think the editor was laughing. And both editors ... His editor was Mark Siegel and mine is Connie Hsu. They both just said, "Hey, let's just address the elephant in the room and let's just say the character is Vietnamese. Just make it easy for yourself."

And Gene thought, "Well that's great because we've done the homework, we've lived it, and that makes complete sense." And a part of me was terrified upon hearing that because I thought, "Oh my God, that means there's going to be a lot of me on this page. And I have not revealed much of me in any of my books." I have very much, like I said, painted a world I wanted to see. So I was a little terrified of that. And then on the other hand, I thought, "This makes things a lot easier. I know what this character is going to look like. I know what her grandmother is going to look like. I know what her father's going to say. I know what the apartment's going to be." And all those bits, those little hints of culture that pop up in the background are not even things I had to think about. They just showed up because that's the fabric of your own life. All of that was great to reveal this part of myself, I guess in a way I'd never done before.

And this book was probably the first time I ever illustrated it in what was probably closest to my own voice. So the drawing style is closest to the way I draw naturally without thinking about it, without having to worry if I'm changing in any way. And for that reason ... I know Gene wrote this book, I know he did, but it feels the closest to anything I've ever done that's revealed ... I don't know. That's revealed those layers of myself and of being a Vietnamese girl at a particular time.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Did you feel like writing? Because it sounds like writing little new your love story was a Cathartic experience in some way. You got to dig a little bit into that. But is there a part of you that ever does want to fully tell your story, fully reveal some parts of yourself more?

LeUyen Pham:
I know my editors have tried, and I'm going to call out Mark Siegel and Connie Hsu here, these two editors for a second. They have tried to get me for a really long time to write about my own story. I really don't like cathartic stories. Do you know what I mean? I feel like they're a bit self-indulgent, and there are some books that are amazing. And if the author experiences catharsis in creating it, it doesn't matter so long as What's the output doesn't feel cathartic. There's a reason for the story being. But there has been an excess of stories where the author is working through something on the page and the world as well as joining along as they're working it out, that I don't necessarily always gravitate towards. That's kept me very hesitant to tell too much of my own story of growing up.

I don't mind telling it in interviews because it's me, it's not a book, it's me that we're talking about. But in a book, I don't know. I'm a little more hesitant about that. But I do like that space that was created when Gene and I were working together of finding an outlet for certain types of stories with that character in mind. So maybe a fictionalized version of things. I don't think I want to do a memoir, but I do think I would like to address that aspect of mostly being poor and being out of place. Of struggling to find a way through this world of feeling like you don't belong and finding a way to belong. If you look through all of my books, they all contain that theme to them. And I think I'd be very interested in writing something like that. I am such an artist. I'm so dependent on visuals that I haven't yet made words fully my friends, so I'm working on that.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
LeUyen has built her career as a prolific creator in part by having agency over her own identity in the world she creates. An agency that as a refugee she wasn't always privileged to have. For her reading challenge, she's curated a list of books that explore this feeling.

LeUyen Pham:
So the theme I chose is called Chasing Home, and it speaks a lot to being a refugee. A refugee more than an immigrant. A refugee you're forced to leave where you are and you don't know where you're going to go. You don't know where you're going to land. You lose what most people call home right away. Being a refugee by suggestion is saying that you can't go back to where you came from. So I've felt that since I was a baby, since I was born.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Even now?

LeUyen Pham:
Even now. Even now. Yeah. Even now, my husband and I have these discussions about where we're going to end up and I just have to find that space where I feel most like myself without my drawings next to me to identify me.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
Because your drawings are like your home.

LeUyen Pham:
Yeah. Yeah, very much. My books are my home. That world that I was creating, the world that I'm building, that's the world I want everyone to live in. It's because no one has a home. Everyone there is loose and free and from all different places around the world, and that's where I feel all the time. And so yeah, there's a chasing home.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
And today's Beanstack featured librarian is Marva Coney. The librarian at Jackson Intermediate at the Pasadena Independent School District in Texas. Marva tells us how she embraces some of the preteen gossip culture to get her students to read.

Marva Coney:
One of my tricks on getting students to try new books is to do an interactive or exciting book talk with them. I normally choose books that I have read before or books that I'm excited to get a chance to read. And so I come at it in the form of spilling some delicious tea where we are just gossiping about this character in this book and the things that they are going through. Everyone knows seventh and eighth graders are gossips. I hear them all the time. So I share the book in that way. I share my excitement about it. I talk about, you will not believe what this character did, or there are these two sisters who do not know that they are sisters. Let me tell you what happens. And I try to read an excerpt from the book if I'm able. And so they really get into it. They know when you're authentic. Kids can smell a fake a mile away. And so I try to always share books that I'm really excited about myself. And so once I'm finished, you should see them. They are racing each other to grab the books. So now whether they finish the books or not, that's up to them. But I'm a true believer that if I keep spoon-feeding them, letting them taste test these different varieties of books, that eventually they will find the one that is just right for them.

Jordan Lloyd Bookey:
This has been The Reading Culture and you've been listening to my conversation with LeUyen Pham. Again, I'm your host, Jordan Lloyd Bookey, and currently I'm reading Remember Us by Jacqueline Woodson, and I am rereading El Defo by Cece Bell. If you enjoyed today's episode, please show some love and give us a five star review. It just takes a second and it really helps. To learn more about how you can help grow your community's reading culture you can check out all of our resources at beanstack.com. And remember to sign up for our newsletter at thereadingculturepod.com/newsletter for special offers and bonus content. This episode was produced by Jackie Lamport and Lower Street Media and script edited by Josiah Lamberto-Egan. Thanks for joining and keep reading.