Process for Home Is a Wish
Pub. February 4, 2025
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I wrote Home is a Wish in 2021 after moving from Cleveland to Seattle, my 7th move in 9 years. The rest of my family was also in motion; my brother made his own cross country move just one week later and my parents were preparing for a third immigration from Taiwan to the US. We have all made home in many different places, knowing each time that there would likely be another place to call home in the near future.
We arrived in Seattle on a blisteringly hot day in July and I was struck by the newness of everything in sight. The leaves on each tree were foreign to me, houses were built in unfamiliar styles and cars were parked in both directions on these narrow, steep streets. And yet I knew this novelty was only temporary! I would gradually learn names like Douglas fir, Western red cedar, and Western Hemlock. Seattle’s bungalow houses would go from novel to normal and my legs would get used to walking across our hilly neighborhood.
I felt inspired to capture the freshness of this transitional time in a book, alongside the bittersweet feeling that comes with moving across countries, continents and cultures. I love a good visual metaphor, so I attempted to link my family’s immigration with a parallel migration pattern (or more specifically, dispersal). What other creature moves across the Pacific Ocean from Taiwan to the west coast, further yet to the Midwest and East coast, and then all the way back to the west coast or Taiwan to settle? It turns out that no other creature does this - a lonely revelation. But thanks to help from a former student’s dad, once Chair of the World Seabird Union, I settled on the movement of the Sooty Tern to help tell our story. It’s a beautiful bird that travels far and wide on its own agency. They can fly for extended periods of time without even landing, wandering up and down the shores of the western US and Taiwan’s coasts but never making a permanent home in either place.
I hope the end product that you are reading now is melancholy but optimistic, unvarnished but comforting, and universal but specific to my own experiences.
These two dummy sketches above didn’t make it into the final book, but I still have a soft spot for them! So they will just live on here for now.
After I finished writing this story, I sketched out what each page might look like and compiled the text and images into a PDF that we call a dummy. My agent then used that dummy to try and sell this book. We gave an exclusive offer to editor Connie Hsu at Roaring Brook, whom I’d already worked with for I Dream of Popo and Let’s Do Everything and Nothing. I was thrilled when I learned that she had accepted our offer!
The following images below are sketches from the dummy that did make it into the final book. They are paired next to the finished version of the spread that appears in the final book.
The birds in the dummy were cranes, but I can’t remember what type I was using for reference! If you have an idea, please let me know =) Later on in the process I replaced the cranes with sooty terns, guiding the way for the airplane through the lonely night sky.
My illustrations are often very flat and graphic, so I thought I would introduce some textures and shadows for this book! I love the rainbow shadows we ended up with here. I like to think of the birds blessing the girl with one last presence as she accepts this new home. I imagine that after this they fly on to the next location where they are needed in their perpetual state of wandering.
I am drawn to stories and pictures that are a little melancholy and a little fantastical, so this sketch on the left was one of my favorites from the dummy. You can see that we make the finish a little more hopeful with the girl paddling toward her new home. In addition to the terns, we have another creature helping to guide her way home: some bluefin tuna. They are introduced earlier in the book when she travels to her new home and appear in much of the new city’s iconography. They represent the culture of this new place.
Growing up, I loved the Chronicles of Narnia, especially The Dawn Treader. A scene that has always stuck with me was when noble Reepicheep fulfills his lifelong dream of finding Aslan’s Country. He says goodbye to Caspian and the children, gets in his little coracle and paddles through the sweet water to the End of the World. I’ve since learned that there are many religious metaphors attached to this series and especially to this scene, but I still love it for what it is at face value. It’s the beauty and loss of watching a loved one bravely leave the life they know for a place they believe is home. This is my homage to that scene.
As you can see in the sketch, this spread was originally wordless! It was made perfect with the help of Connie who suggested adding a line about drifting!
I was conflicted with how literally to depict any of my past or current home cities in this book. In the end I settled on starting the story with an ambiguously Midwest home with its identical low-storied brick apartments, but paired with rubber trees and a subway (a little nod to Taiwan). The new home is perhaps less-ambiguously Seattleish with its mountains, water, hilly neighborhoods and cranes.
The Auntie June, camellias, and Carmen in this spread’s text all have a little bit of personal meaning behind them:
Auntie June: Growing up, I was taught to address every one who was my parents’ age as Auntie or Uncle as a sign of respect. That is how I plan to raise my daughter, too!
Camellias: In 2023, just as I was finishing the artwork for this book, we moved yet again! This time we had bought our first house, and I was delighted to see that there were 3 camellia bushes planted outside. Camellia bushes are the same plants that much of the tea I drink comes from, and I have fond memories of my Amah looking at their beautiful blooms.
Carmen: My sweet black and white lab-pit companion who appears in many of my books!