Let's start at the beginning of this book.

My stories usually begin with a basic idea: One day, a bullied girl goes missing, and her bullies try to find her.

That premise informs some of the plot beats, but really, the heart of a story comes from questions. There are always big, impossible questions that seem to orbit around an idea, questions that never have an answer. Questions I can’t help but try to unravel.

In Jennifer Chan, I was thinking about bullying, drawing on my own middle school experiences and wondering:

How do we forgive a person who knocks us down?

What makes a bully?

And, What does it mean to be good?

When I started this book in January 2020, these questions felt intimate and personal, the kind I could spend years exploring.

But then, in March, the world I’d been writing in fundamentally changed.

Suddenly, all those old questions felt light years away, like they belonged to someone else. I still cared about them. I still wanted to explore the story. But in those initial months, I stopped writing. I stopped brainstorming. The only question I could ask was, Will we be okay?  The only thing I could do was refresh the constantly updating news cycle.

Even later, when I found my way back to some semblance of routine, writing felt different than before. With WYTAT and SOBT, I’d felt consumed. Now, I found it hard to focus.

You’re not really…talking about this book, Josh mentioned, one late summer night. That’s…unusual.

This was his ever so polite way of saying that I usually talk incessantly about the plot holes and character beats I’m trying to work out.

The questions in this book just don’t feel relevant right now, I said.

But as I looked up at the stars and thought about my story and its themes, I wondered if that was true. It had certainly felt true, at first. But as the months went on, I’d started to suspect that there was something more to my hesitancy.

Writing has always been my way of processing the world. In this book, I’d intended to process my experience of being bullied—and I knew I still would. But I also knew that I’d be processing the pandemic, the ways covid had shifted my perspective and broadened my focus. If I let myself dive in, I wasn’t sure what I’d find.

So, I returned to the questions carefully at first, and then a little braver. I let myself dig deeper. I opened myself up and brainstormed and wrote, and before long I started to hear them—the new questions rattling around my heart. They were familiar, but they’d shifted.  

I was no longer asking, How do we forgive a person who knocks us down?  I was asking, How do we forgive in a world that knocks us—and others—down?

I wasn’t asking, What does it mean to be a bully? But, What does it mean to be a person? When everything else is stripped away—who are we?

And forget how to be good—was it even possible to be good?

For the record, these questions worried me. They were 2 a.m.-existential-crisis worthy—probably not the kind of questions you want to foist upon unsuspecting twelve-year-olds.

But foist upon I did! Preorder Jennifer Chan today!

Just kidding. Mostly. I didn’t foist. I wrote. I told myself that if this book ended up too dark, I didn’t need to publish it. I could write something else instead. I could revise the existential away. But for a moment, I gave myself the space to explore.

I thought stepping into these questions would be like flinging myself into some cold, deep-space abyss. I thought this would become the darkest book I’d written.

As I ventured further into my story, though, it began to surprise me.

When you ask impossible questions, you don’t often get answers. But sometimes, you do get better questions.

And as I continued to write and revise, I saw those questions evolve yet again.

Because, if we live in a world that knocks people down—how do we change it?

If it’s not possible to be good (in some elusive, inherent way), then how do we do good?

And if we’re learning who we are, with everything else stripped away, that’s great. Now, who do we want to become?

Where I’d expected to find paralyzing answers, I found instead an invitation to grow, change, and believe in myself and others.

As I peeled back the layers, my focus moved from fear to action. Love, hurt, and help shifted from nouns to verbs.

And in that shift, Jennifer Chan was no longer the darkest story I’d written. In the end, it became the most hopeful.

Now, Jennifer Chan is a story about the ways the world—and the world of middle school—can be scary and uncertain. It’s about the complexity of goodness and kindness, and the ways our society sometimes makes it hard to be the people we want to be.

And it’s also about the power we all hold to create change and find connection. It’s about the capacity we all have to choose, if we let ourselves, to make the world a little brighter.

So, for now, this Fall, I hope you’re finding some brightness, even in the dark—even in the rainy gray.

💙,
Tae