Newsmaker: Grace Lin
In early May, bestselling author-illustrator Grace Lin published her first novel in nearly nine years. Based on Chinese folklore, The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) tells the story of an irrepressible stone lion cub and a girl who must open a portal for the spirits.
Throughout her more than 25-year career, Lin has garnered many accolades, including a 2010 Newbery Honor, a 2019 Caldecott Honor, and a 2022 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. In advance of her appearance at the upcoming American Library Association 2025 Annual Conference in Philadelphia, she talked with American Libraries about being inspired by myths, the insidiousness of book bans, and finding comfort in the library as a child.
Your new book, The Gate, the Girl, and the Dragon, is set in the present, which is a departure from the folklore and historical fiction you typically write.
I am very inspired by myths and legends, so my way to incorporate this element into the story was to use real urban legends, like the lore around the golden pillar holding up the Shanghai expressway [believed to be the resting place of the city’s guardian dragon]. In a way, this shows kids that magic and legends and myths aren’t from a million years ago—we’re making them right now. That’s how I approached this novel, thinking about how we are making our own mythology and how we’re interplaying it with what has come before it.
In your author’s note, you describe the book as a “true hybrid” and compare it with the Bao-Xiang flower. Can you expand on this?
In Chinese culture, there’s something called the Bao-Xiang flower. It’s a flower that is highly revered and cherished, and it’s often painted on fine porcelain. But this flower is not a flower you can grow; it’s a flower of fiction. A long time ago, an artist decided to mix the lotus, the rose, and the peony together and make this flower called the Bao-Xiang, which everybody loves and thinks is so beautiful. That’s how I feel about my book, because it’s a mix of all these different things—of old and new, of Asian mythology and American culture—that come together to make this flower of a book.
There is a strong message of helping and protecting others throughout this book—even those who may have done harm. Why was this central to the story you wanted to tell?
The heart of this book, what really glued it all together, was an experience during the pandemic when I was in charge of my daughter’s academic pod. The girls and I were setting up outside, and our rickety computer table fell over. It was complete chaos, and everyone was getting upset with one another. And I remember saying over all the noise, “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is! We just need to fix the problem.” And when I said that, I realized that I wasn’t really saying that to them. I was saying that to me. At the time, the world was in such chaos, and a lot of blame was being directed at China, which was hard [to witness] as an Asian American. So when the table incident happened, it clicked that it doesn’t matter whose fault it is at this point. We just need to get together and fix this problem and be the best we can during it. That really became the heart of the book.
What role have libraries played in your life?
I love libraries! When I was a child, my parents didn’t understand extracurricular activities, like soccer or anything like that, but they did understand the library. After dinner, we used to go to the big public library [in New Hartford, New York] and just spend the evening there. The children’s section was in the basement, and there were rows and rows and rows of books. I remember just walking through, trailing my hands over the spines, and feeling like all the characters in those books were my good friends. My parents were immigrants. They weren’t sure how to blend in, and we were the only Asian family in town at that time. But I felt that the books were always welcoming.
The act of storytelling is such an important part of your novels, yet the current surge in book bans seeks to silence so many voices. What are your thoughts on these bans?
I have some wonderful friends who create beautiful books, but the way they’re getting targeted is so scary and aggressively horrible that I feel like all the attention and protection should go toward authors and books like that. However, I don’t want to say that it’s been easy for authors like me either. It’s the soft banning that’s so insidious.
Is soft banning, in essence, quietly opting out?
Yes. For my books, it’s not so much that they’re being banned—though Dim Sum for Everyone! was among those under review in Florida [in 2022 under House Bill 1467], which chills classroom discussions on race and racism. It shows how off-the-deep-end the banning has gotten. The teachers and librarians I’ve spoken to are scared, and their jobs are already not easy. It’s a lot easier for them to just not choose my book, to not have me in as an author. It’s easier for my books not to be shared. And I understand that, but that is also really, really heartbreaking. If they’re scared to share books as noncontroversial as Dim Sum for Everyone!, where are we? And what does that say to the kids? We’re in a hard place.
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