By Jane Park, author of Inheritance.

I became a writer by first becoming a reader, and one of my favourite places to go as a child was the library. This was the ’80s, before the internet existed, and I received my dopamine hits by walking through the aisles of books, sliding my finger against the hardbound spines, knowing that whichever book I chose would give me entrance into another person’s ideas and imagination. My mother took me there frequently because it gave me something educational to do, and best of all, it was free.

So I read. Although my own novel is entirely fictional, like my protagonist, for a part of my childhood, I lived in a small town where my parents ran a grocery store, and oftentimes I would go to the town library and stay there until closing. Usually, I was the only person there and I greedily grabbed stacks of books, with a vague goal to read through the entire library. 

I read through the entire Sweet Valley High series, never finding the plotlines repetitive. Also, I devoured all books by V. C. Andrews—of incest plot fame—which, in hindsight, I do not recommend for children to read. I wasn’t a discerning reader—more so a greedy one who just liked the satisfaction of knowing I read a lot of books on those shelves.

However, there was one book that I avoided: Joy Kogawa's Obasan. I still remember the cover: a Japanese girl gazed longingly out a window. She looked forlorn, but so did that book, with its uncracked spine and glossy cover, waiting for anyone to take notice of it. As the library’s most frequent patron, I knew that no one in town ever did. In turn, neither did I. For decades. 

I’m trying to parse out why. Was it because, as the only book in the library with an Asian protagonist, some imaginary white person was telling me that this book—even if I loved or hated it—had to be my friend, would represent me? Or, even more problematic, was it because I thought an Asian protagonist was beneath me? 

Because back then, I was also writing stories. My female protagonists were always blonde with blue eyes, as were her love interests. To be judicious, I would include brunettes and red-heads as supporting cast, but never Asian, or rather, never non-white. And I never thought this to be a problem. 

Nor was it a problem when, in university, I studied English Literature, and throughout my four years of reading one to two novels a week, I never encountered a single book with an Asian character. In my entire studies, I read two books with BIPOC protagonists from a professor who assigned Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple—both American books. I applied to the university’s sole undergraduate creative writing class, and was not surprised I did not get in.

After I graduated, I moved to Edmonton, and was surprised and delighted that I got admitted into the graduate creative writing course offered at the University of Alberta. While workshopping my short story about a Korean family, one student said that my writing reminded her of Obasan. What was meant as a compliment felt like a jab, like a person mistaking me for the only other Asian girl in the room. Never mind that I had never read Obasan, I was not her. She’s Japanese! I’m Korean! Obasan deals with the Japanese internment—my writing does not! How could there ever be any similarity between us?

It took another decade after this event to actually read the book. By then, I discovered authors like Maxine Hong Kingston and Jhumpa Lahiri, and my understanding of who gets to tell stories was rapidly changing. When I finally read Obasan, I fell in love. It’s a Canadian masterpiece. Joy Kogawa wrote about the prairies, racism and past injustices with a restrained anger that simmered throughout the book. When I finished it, I realized the highest compliment would be to have my writing compared to Joy Kogawa’s. If a sub-genre of Canadian Asian Prairie writing ever exists, I would be so proud to have my novel next to hers. Then, I felt regret: what if, as a child, I checked out that neglected book at that town library and read about growing up Asian in the Canadian prairies? How would that change my understanding of who was allowed to tell a story? Would it have taken me this long to debut?

Recently, my sons have been watching through the entirety of Marvel movies. One son has a keen interest in superheroes, but they follow a very familiar mold. I encouraged him to watch Shang-Chi, which stars a Chinese superhero, and he put it off for the longest time. When he finally watched it last month, afterward, told me he didn’t like it because Shang-Chi wasn’t as “strong” as the other Marvel superheroes. I asked what that meant, and he could not articulate it, other than Shang-Chi lacked legitimacy, which I interpreted as that he wasn’t white. For my son, seeing an Asian male cast as a superhero felt disingenuous, much like how I felt at his age seeing a Japanese girl on the cover of a novel. 

This is one reason that compels me to write. I’ve realized that we—BIPOC writers—still have work to do. And as my book is going out into the world, I hope it reaches an aspiring writer from an Asian immigrant background who reads it and thinks, “I can do this too.”

Jane Park's new novel, Inheritance, is available now.