Finding My Voice perfectly captures that diasporic in-between feeling when you know that you don’t quite fit in with your immigrant parents’ view of your life, but you also don’t fit in with your peers at school. It navigates the rocky terrain of trying to brush off microaggressions in the form of off-color “jokes” from bullies and classmates and even teachers in a position of authority. This book encapsulates that hard-to-describe feeling of having so many similarities to your peers, but feeling like the unavoidable fact of your heritage sets you ever so slightly apart no matter how much you try to blend in. At the same time, Finding My Voice is a quintessential teen book about trying to navigate high school and find some semblance of belonging that is a universal teen struggle. Noticing how the homecoming court is a popularity contest or that some people seem to rise above with such little effort while the majority of us were struggling to tread the deep waters that are teenage angst.
I am so happy that Finding My Voice is finding new life for a whole new generation of readers. And I am sad. Because I never found this book in my formative years when it was so hard to put words to how “othered” I felt in my everyday life. Whenever my friends made jokes about my Koreanness, I laughed it off because I didn’t want to “kill the mood.” Whenever my parents had higher expectations of me because I had to be three times better than my white peers to get exactly the same thing, I thought it was so unfair but I had no way to explain that feeling to parents who’d struggled through much harder times than I did. I wish I’d had Ellen to guide me through those hard feelings when I was a teen. Which is why I’m so glad that so many Korean and Asian-American teens will have her now.
—Kat Cho