PaperTigers is delighted to be hosting author and illustrator Grace Lin on Day 2 of her Blog Tour to introduce her latest book, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, which, as Aline pointed out last week, has already received its first award! We’ll be publishing a full review in our next issue of PaperTigers… in the meantime, Grace has kindly answered some questions and shared some pictures with us.

Welcome, Grace: thank you for joining us!

In an article you once wrote called “Why Couldn’t Snow White be Chinese?”, you talk about an experience you had as a child when your school put on a production of The Wizard of Oz and you were told by a friend you couldn’t be chosen to play Dorothy because “Dorothy’s not Chinese”. How would you relate that experience to your writing of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, which has been described as being written in “the Wizard of Oz tradition”?

Wow, that is a very astute observation of my work. While I did not write Where the Mountain Meets the Moon as an attempt to create an Asian Dorothy, it is probably one of the reasons why I felt so strongly that the main character needed to be a girl and why this book is an Asian-inspired fantasy (a story influenced by my Asian-American values rather than an attempt at a traditional Chinese tale).

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is very, very loosely based on the Chinese folktale “Olive Lake,” Aside from adding many layers and changing plot points, I also changed the main character from an adult male to the girl, Minli. In some ways it may have been easier to leave the character male; I would not have had to worry about how I bent /ignored some Chinese customs that inhibit women — like the fact that there is no foot binding, for example. But I very much wanted the main character to be a girl, a strong and brave and clever girl who (now that you mention it) was someone I would’ve wanted to pretend that I was as I child.

You have referred to your illustrating of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon as being “like the classic books of yore” – do you think illustrated books for independant readers are starting to be published a bit more nowadays and how important do you think they are? (more…)

Indian writer Swapna Dutta has contributed some great articles to PaperTigers over the past few years, so we are delighted now to publish an interview with her as an added extra to our January/February update.

In it, she talks about her own stories and the challenges of retelling classic tales. She also makes some interesting observations about the languages of books published in India…