Dear Reader,
Growing up, I wanted to read about Asian American teens who get to have adventure and romance. But books like that weren’t around back then. Gemma’s story isn’t my story. But her story is the one I wanted to read as a kid searching for myself in books.
When I went to China for the first time as a young adult, I thought I’d feel an instant sense of belonging to the country where my parents and grandparents were born. I built up this visit as a magical homecoming. That’s how much I needed a place where I belonged.
As you might imagine, it wasn’t that simple. In Heiress Apparently, I wanted to write a story about a Chinese American girl who goes to China and gets that homecoming. While I was writing the book, I thought a lot about belonging. Asian Americans’ right to belong in the United States has always been challenged. As I write this, we are in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic when anti-Asian racism, harassment, and violence have been increasing at an alarming rate. It is harder and harder to feel like I belong in the country where I was born.
But when I wrote the last scene of Heiress Apparently—I felt it. A hope humming in my blood. I thought of you, reader, and I hoped you would recognize some part of yourself in Gemma—a Chinese American girl who gets to be the star of her own story. And that felt a lot like belonging.
In Chinese, the character for “jia” means both family and home. I hope you find both family and home in Gemma’s story.
Warmly,
Diana Ma