Tae Keller on Jennifer Chan is Not Alone

MIXED ASIAN MEDIA - April 26, 2022

By Erica Ito

In 2021, Tae Keller won the Newbery medal for her novel When You Trap a Tiger, which centers around Korean mythology. Her upcoming novel, Jennifer Chan is Not Alone, follows Mallory, a quarter-Korean girl living in Nowhereville, Florida, as she navigates the horrors of 7th grade social politics. When Jennifer Chan, the mysterious new girl who believes in aliens, runs away, Mallory goes on a mission to find her, and to find out why she really left.

This book unapologetically cracked me open and let all my 12-year-old feelings spill out. I couldn’t wait to chat with Tae about post-Newbery life, diving back into childhood traumas, and writing intersecting identities in Jennifer Chan.

Last year, you literally won the most prestigious award in children's literature, not to mention the Asian Pacific American Award for Children's Literature. Tell me what life has been like since then.

Well, there's kind of this weird thing where I won during COVID, so it's obviously been amazing and surreal and incredible, but it has also felt a little bit like the award exists on Zoom for me, because I haven't really done anything in person for the whole past year. Right now is the first time that I’m going out in public and meeting people, so it's starting to feel real for the first time. But it's been really great and it's changed my writing life dramatically in the sense that I'm now doing a lot more zoom events, I'm meeting a lot more kids, which has been really cool, to be able to talk to students and hear about their reactions to the book.

Probably one of the most amazing things about the Newbery is that it kind of launched the book in Korea as well. I've been able to interact with Korean readers, which is something that I never even dreamt possible and has been really rewarding.

That's amazing. Speaking of talking to middle schoolers, you write very candidly in your author's note that Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone is inspired by your own experience with middle school bullying. I'm really curious, how did you decide whose perspective through which you were going to tell this complicated, heartbreaking story about what makes a bully?

Oh my gosh, that was a hard choice. From the time that I was in middle school, I was trying to process the experience of being bullied. I was writing a lot about that experience, and I was also looking for books about bullying. I found books about kids who were being bullied, which was really helpful for me, but I also wanted to know more about why it happened and about the kids who had bullied me. I was looking for a way to understand.

So that's what I wanted to bring to this book, to give this other perspective on what happened. I thought about who I was in middle school when I was reading those books. In hindsight this was not a healthy thing for me to be doing, but I was looking for the labels. Which kid is the bully and which kid is the victim? What about the main mean girl and the sidekick? I was trying to understand the social structure in this very limited way.

When I was writing Jennifer Chan, I wanted to broaden that and show kids and readers that, you know, none of us are one thing and one label. You can be a good person who does a bad thing. All of us make mistakes sometimes, and we all have experiences on different sides of the coin. Sometimes other people hurt us, and sometimes we hurt other people. How do we all move forward together?

I don’t think I’ve ever come across a middle grade book that’s truly asked those questions before. As I was reading I was like, “Oh no, we're really going there.” So you grew up in Hawai’i (and a full disclosure for whoever's reading this article, we went to the same K-12 Christian private school), but Jennifer Chan is set in Florida. How did you bend and shape your experiences growing up as a mixed kid in Hawai’i to create Mallory’s experiences growing up as a mixed kid in “Nowheresville, Florida?”

Yeah, when I was thinking about Florida as a setting, there were a lot of different boxes I wanted to check. I knew that it had to be a warm place because a young girl goes missing— I didn't want there to be this terrible question of like, is she freezing? I also wanted it to be on the mainland because both Mallory and Jennifer are Asian, and I wanted them to be in a setting where that wasn't common, so I knew that it couldn't be Hawai’i where we grew up.

I also picked Florida because it has some of the most UFO sightings in the U.S. It was the perfect setting for a book that has so many, ah, alien ideas.

It was challenging in some ways to write. I think I drew from my experiences being mixed race on the mainland and being in settings where it's not common to be around a lot of other Asian people. And then I actually took a research trip to Florida and drove around for three days, just trying to collect all of these details so the setting could feel really authentic. So, you know, what did the houses look like? What is the heat like? It was very hot.

That's awesome. Did you do anything fun in particular when you were in Florida that stood out?

I mean, of course, it's a research trip, but I also added a few days to go to Disney World, because how could you not?

Yay! That was really my question. So Mallory actually isn't the only mixed character in Jennifer Chan. We also have Kath who is Black and Jewish, also an anomaly in their predominantly white Catholic school. How did Kath come into the story?

I wanted to show these overlaps of identity. There's this overlap with Mallory and Jennifer — Jennifer is a full Asian and Mallory is mixed, and they bond over being Asian and having different ways that they relate to their identity. Then Kath and Mallory bond over that experience of being mixed and having these different expectations for different sides of their identity.

I wanted to show the ways that they are able to connect with each other and the ways that those identities are still distinct and different.

Speaking of identity, I won't give away any plot points, but there's a moment when Mallory, almost out of the blue, says to her mom, “Do you think I'm Korean?”

I felt like one of the most emotional parts of this book for me was Mallory's relationship with her mom because you can just feel that insurmountable wall between the two of them growing higher and higher as she goes through puberty. Growing up biracial, I’ve sometimes felt like we have slightly different relationships with each of our parents that change as we grow up. Did you ever feel that way? How did that relationship come into the book for you?

Yeah. I think Mallory's relationship with her parents… there is that difference between her relationship with her mom and her relationship with her dad. With her dad, it's more of a straightforward relationship, whereas— and a lot of this is subtext, it's not all inside of the book— with her mom, there’s that tension that I think comes so much from almost the feeling of not wanting to let your parents down because it feels like… how do I put this?

Oof, yeah, it’s a big one.

Because it feels like with each generation you're moving away from that identity and worrying that when that parent looks at you, they’re seeing kind of this step away from their culture and how painful and scary that can be. I think in these conversations with Mallory and her mom, especially this one where she asks if her mom thinks she's Korean, I wanted to have all of that tension, and also have her mom really see her and reassure her.

Absolutely. Your mom, Nora Okja Keller, is a best-selling author and was actually my sophomore year English teacher. Your sister, Sunhi, is a dancer and serves as your part-time assistant. Your bio mentions you growing up on your halmeoni’s tiger stories. How is storytelling woven into the fabric of your family? Also, how has the business of writing novels melded with that storytelling tradition?

I feel so lucky to have grown up in the family that I did. So many of my writer friends didn't even know that being a writer was a job or a thing that people did. But from the time that I was born, I saw my mom writing books. I saw that it was a real career path I could aspire towards.

I feel so lucky because she's my first reader. I will write drafts and then send them to her, and she gives such good feedback. Also being an English teacher, she's always like, “Why do you use so many commas? Your grammar’s so weird.” But it's great.

You really have such a gift for describing that messy, painful, difficult inner life of young women. How are you inspired by the women in your life, the women in your family?

I feel like I can be most myself with the women in my family. That is such a gift, to have that safe space where you can really be who you are. And I've had so many important, honest conversations with my female family members and female friends that I always want to bring into my books. You know, they're not always perfect relationships. There's tension there, but I always want these relationships to be supportive too, and to not just show women in competition with one another, which we see so often in media. I wanna show all of the complicated, really human ways that women connect with women.

Speaking of women in competition, and going back a bit to what you said about overlapping identities, Reagan and Tess function as Jennifer Chan’s “mean girls.” And yet they totally resist two dimensional stereotyping. As readers we get to see into their home lives and understand a bit of why they behave this way. Were there specific characters from books or movies that you drew inspiration from for Reagan and Tess?

Oh my gosh. That's a good question. So speaking of all the books that I was trying to find about bullying when I was in middle school, I really gravitated towards the Clique series. I haven't gone back and read those since I was in middle school, but I'm sure that series has infiltrated my brain.

Incredible. For my final question I do have to ask, do you believe in aliens? Has writing this book changed your perspective on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life? 

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited about this question.

I'm sure you're going to get asked about it a lot during this press cycle.

Yeah, it's so different from the questions I got for When You Trap a Tiger! The answer is: I don't know. Which I feel like is such an unsatisfying answer after writing a whole book about the possibility of alien life. Before I wrote the book, I would've said yes. And it's not that writing the book has made me believe less in aliens, it's just doing so much research about not just aliens and alien conspiracy, but astrophysics and the universe has really made me realize how much there is that we don't know and we don't understand and how beautiful and exciting that is. The universe is infinite. And what does it mean to be infinite? There’s no way we can have an answer yet.

Born and raised on the east side of O’ahu, Erica learned about improv comedy in 7th grade, and it's pretty much all been downhill from there. She holds a BFA in Musical Theatre from the University of Michigan and can be found yelling about coming of age love stories and mythology with her genius co-host/best friend on their podcast Seaweed Brain. Check it out @SeaweedBrainPodcast. www.ericaito.com