Process for When Love Is More Than Words
Written by Jocelyn Chung
Pub. October 15, 2024
Purchase from Bookshop
This book is written by fellow Taiwanese American Jocelyn Chung. More so than any other book I’ve worked on, When Love Is More Than Words is a joyful celebration of our shared Taiwanese American identity!
Many Taiwanese in the US immigrated within the same generation, after the passing of the 1965 Hart Celler Act, so at baseline Taiwanese American kids have many similarities. But like any other ethnic group there will always be nuanced differences across culture, politics, religion and more.
Jocelyn’s juxtaposition of Taiwanese phrases, Japanese names, and mix of Western and Eastern practices spoke loudly to me that we come from very similar family backgrounds. When we finally met in person, I was happy to learn that we have even more in common: we are both illustrators and have worked at greeting card companies, have partners in medicine, lived in Southern California and Taiwan, and more! It is so special to make a book with someone with whom I share so much common ground.
I am thrilled to present this snapshot of what it looks like to love as a Taiwanese American family at this time, in this place, with our rich family histories.
As the illustrator on a book, I typically start working only when I receive a final manuscript that everyone has signed off on. But sometimes late text changes are inevitable, whether it’s because we are on an expedited schedule or simply because the team continues to be in conversation about the text after I’ve started working. The illustration above is the first image I created for the book, a sample image of what the finals would look like that would help guide the sketches. You can see that the execution is largely similar to the way the finished book looks now, with a few differences (mostly a heavier texture and color gradient). Oftentimes my sample images will make their way into the final book, but if you look below you’ll see that it was spliced into two separate spreads.
This is due to the manuscript changing and text shifting across spreads. “Keico A-ma studies the lines on my palms” gets its own spread (above right) and the remaining “Have you eaten yet?” text gets a different spread, not shown here. I wanted to salvage the original sample image somehow, and thankfully it fit quite well on a different spread of text about Mama filling the girl’s plate with the best parts of the fish (above left)!
The silver lining is that I was able to add a bit of Japanese identity into Keico A-ma’s palm-reading spread via the feel of her house background. Jocelyn names one A-ma as “Keico” and one A-gong as “Keyo”, both distinctly Japanese names, reflecting a specific period in Taiwan’s history when it was a Japanese colony (1895-1945, after the First Sino-Japanese war and after WWII). During this time, Taiwanese people had to speak Japanese and take on Japanese names. The complicated legacy of this rule has lingered through the generations. My own A-ma mixed Japanese and Taiwanese language throughout the rest of her life, picking up the phone with “moshi moshi” and addressing her oldest son by his Japanese name “Masa”.
In all, I did about 3 rounds of sketches for this book. On the left you’ll see another text change that happened between the 1st and 2nd rounds. Jocelyn originally grouped the fish text along with the other ways that Mama takes care of the girl when she’s sick - because that is her own lived experience! In my own family, there is a fish soup that is made when someone is very ill, but I have personally never had it.
After the text change from the editorial team, the fish text went to the spread shown above and I replaced that dish with a small congee spread - the food I was given when I was sick growing up and still make now for those days under the weather.
While both spreads are representative and true in different ways for Jocelyn and myself, this is a good example of how subtle changes to text, image and pagination will affect the presentation of a story.
Lastly, there are some sketches that make it to finish without much fuss! This is one of my favorite pages in the book.
If you think too realistically you may have questions about exactly where these kids are and what they are doing. Instead, I wanted to create a feeling that is more reminiscent of the vague childhood memories we hang on to for years and years - the feeling of being on great adventures with your siblings, with little memory of the logistical details of how anything actually happened.