What AAPI Heritage Month Means to Me
The story of my life can be told through a collection of mismatched objects—sparkling pieces of jade jewelry, creased piano workbooks, tattered stuffed animals that have lost most of their stuffing. But back in high school, if you’d asked me what item I’d save from a burning house, I’ve have rummaged through my desk to pull out my latest composition notebook, its pages crammed with my handwriting.
(Where Is My History in Regency Romance?)
Before I (reluctantly) transitioned to a laptop, my notebooks were my most prized possessions. I filled them with my stories, creating adventures for characters that I’d seen in movies and television shows. I wrote by myself, hunched over my desk like some sleep-deprived gremlin, losing myself in each world I crafted. In my stories, the characters were powerful. They were brave. And always—always—they were white.
I’ve heard before that people write what they know. As a kid growing up in Texas, I was one of the few students of Asian descent in my graduating class. With it came a familiar barrage of jokes—the jabs about my eyes, the remarks about my meals. In response, I pretended everything was fine. I rolled with the punches and shrugged away the comments. I hid whatever loneliness had settled under my skin, this visceral discomfort at my own heritage.
Yet when I went to college, something changed. I experienced a slow, tectonic shift in the way I viewed my identity, surrounded for the first time by people from a myriad of backgrounds. I began to embrace my roots through the clubs I joined and the classes I took, branching out in a way I never had before. Here, I came to understand that being Taiwanese American is not a mutually exclusive term, that I can be as much Taiwanese as I am American.
Enter 2020. The year I was set to graduate also happened to be the year that the world was thrown into chaos. After my school shut down its dorms due to the budding pandemic, I was lucky enough to return home to Texas, where I quarantined with my family. Suddenly, I had an immense amount of free time and nothing to do with it. We played a shocking number of board games. I read every YA fantasy under the sun.
It was around here that I decided to write my debut novel.
It was a revelation that took me by surprise. While I adored the stories in my composition notebooks, those characters had never been original. Not to mention I’d never pictured myself writing a book before, which seemed like something utterly out of reach.
With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!
But the girl in my head—the one who would become my main character, Teia Carthan—refused to leave me alone. I knew from the beginning who she was, even if some minor details remained fuzzy. She would be a royal, in a country gripped by a rebel movement. She would be devious and brilliant and unapologetically ruthless, going toe-to-toe with her murderous half brother. She would join the rebellion with the intention to betray them.
Most importantly of all, she would be of AAPI descent—someone who looked like me, who was a racial minority in the place she grew up. Yet while figuring out my identity was a messy, uncertain process, I made the conscious choice that Teia would be proud of her roots from the start. She knows who she is. She embraces her heritage. Although Inferno’s Heir is, in many ways, a coming-of-age story, Teia’s arc is defined outside of her cultural discovery.
She is the type of character I needed to read just a few years back.
There was a period in my life when AAPI Heritage Month wouldn’t have meant anything at all. Now, though, I look forward to each May as a time of great celebration, as I look back on the years in quiet reflection. I’m reminded of how far I’ve come, in both my personal growth and the stories I create. For the first time, I’m writing characters who have fantastic powers and grand adventures, yet still look and feel like me. My writing reads authentic in a way that it didn’t before, as if I’m truly leaving a sliver of myself behind on each page.
I think it’s fitting, then, that I’m writing this piece in my childhood bedroom, at the very desk where I finished my first draft of Inferno’s Heir. And to the left, hidden away in the drawer—a stack of composition notebooks, laid right on top, covered in a thin layer of dust.
Check out Tiffany Wang’s Inferno’s Heir here:
(WD uses affiliate links)