NOTE TO TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS

A huge part of why I write, and why I create the kinds of books and stories that I do, is about building empathy in my readers. That’s my guiding principle.

I was a migrant child of the 1970s and 1980s. Being Asian or migrant or refugee was certainly never positively portrayed or synonymous with being ‘Australian’ back then. I never saw myself in any children’s books from that time, and I have only just, in 2020, edited a picture book featuring a little Asian girl protagonist which was wholly written and illustrated by an Asian-Australian author.

Tiger Daughter is the product of years of thinking and processing, and it’s trying to work on a number of levels.

It’s seeking to build that empathy in readers, but it’s also interrogating things that humanity is currently grappling with – racism, sexism, violence against women and girls, financial abuse, intersectionality, superstition, systemic bias, unconscious bias, privilege, the mainstream idea of what is ‘normal’ – through the story of a migrant girl who has to resist these things while walking in two worlds: the mainstream ‘Western’ sphere she is expected to navigate and accumulate fluency in, and the private, cultural sphere in which she is being brought up.

Tiger Daughter asks mainstream readers – readers who’ve never been told to ‘go back where you come from’, and never will – to think about what it would feel like to be marginalised for more reasons than merely being female.

Tiger Daughter is also, most defiantly, not a book that assumes anything. It does not assume that the reader and writer share an identical background that is somehow ‘universal’, homogenous and instantly translatable. It does not assume that the reader’s and the writer’s ways of thinking, their philosophies, their belief systems or their conditions of life are the same, because they can’t be. While it can’t speak for, or to, everyone who is migrant or refugee, Tiger Daughter is a migrant story for children actually written by a migrant. Not someone ‘imagining’, from inside their relative privilege, what it would feel like to be one. And that makes Tiger Daughter, if not unique, then sadly still too rare.

As recently as the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020, I was subjected to racial abuse by the family members of a neighbour while standing in the ‘safety’ of my own garden. Even though I worked then as a commercial lawyer in one of the biggest law firms in the country, that feeling – of being an outsider – never ever goes away. Not for me, and not, I imagine, for any migrant or refugee Australian. There is not one day where I am not intensely aware of relative levels of privilege, and I am always working to ensure that in my dealings with First Nations people, with People of Colour, with people of every kind there is, I am doing the right thing.

Tiger Daughter is about one girl’s small quest to do the right thing, despite having no power or privilege. I really hope it speaks to you and to the children in your lives who are processing and grappling with the same big issues that we are.

Rebecca Lim