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MEET MILLY LEE
by Bonnie O'Brian

What did you most like to do when you were a child?

Milly Lee

When I was a child growing up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, my favorite activity was reading. I found words beyond my imagination; I found solace, inspiration, adventure, sadness, humor, and some scary times as well. But what I found in books was not my reality, these books were “a word apart” in which I did not find a place for myself. I didn’t see Chinese children in books; I didn’t read about people like me; I never saw myself in books, films, TV, magazines, newspapers, or online.

Who influenced you to become a writer?

For a good part of my life, I worked with children and books. I enjoyed being a school librarian and now I enjoy being a writer of children’s books. I never thought I could write a book and get it published. I was so fortunate in having a friend who saw the potential in my stories. In 1992, after I had retired from my job as the Sonoma County Schools’ Librarian, a writer friend, Mavis Jukes, encouraged me to write. She asked many questions to help me clarify my thinking, she encouraged me to expand my stories by including many cultural details, and she read my many drafts and encouraged me every step of the way. I am deeply indebted to her.

W as your first book accepted immediately? or did you experience a number of rejections?

Many writers talk about the many rejection letters they received when they started writing for publication. I was fortunate in meeting an editor, Frances Foster, during the 1992 American Library Association Conference. I asked her if she would look at my manuscript to tell me if it could be published as a children’s picture book. She liked it immediately, and gave me a book contract. We began immediately to do the work to make my story into a book. NIM AND THE WAR EFFORT was published five years later by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the Spring of 1997.

What are the topics are some of your books?

My three books are about the Chinese experience in America. NIM AND THE WAR EFFORT was my story set during World War II. EARTHQUAKE was based on my mother’s experience during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and LANDED is based on my father-in-law’s experience on Angel Island when he came to America as a young boy. All of the main characters are based on people I knew, and the stories are based on real incidents in their lives.

Have any of your books earned special recognition??

NIM AND THE WAR EFFORT was selected as an ALA Notable Book; A New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year; and received the 1998 Children’s Book Award of the International Reading Association. NIM AND THE WAR EFFORT was also in the 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002 Elementary California Collections. NIM AND THE WAR EFFORT is till in print after ten years. Recently, LANDED, received the 2007 Commonwealth Club’s California Book Award for Juvenile Literature. I feel so honored by this award, which places my name among other California authors such as John Steinbeck and Wallace Stegner. I am gaining some confidence in my writing because of these awards.

How would you describe your writing process?

I enjoy the research aspect of writing stories so much that I have to force myself to stop and begin to write. The writing part is difficult for me, I do not enjoy the process, but I work at it so that the stories can be told. I think of myself more as a reader than a writer. I am not very disciplined with my writing. I think for a long time before I start to ask myself questions about the story. This is the time to do my research because I need to know many details before I can go on writing the story. Once I start writing, it doesn’t take very long before I have a first draft. When I feel the story is moving along well, I send my editor a draft and ask her if she thinks I have enough for us to work together on it. She has not rejected any of my stories so far, lucky me! The rewriting and rewriting is tedious, but it makes me think and helps me work towards making the stories good enough for publication.

What do you talk about when you make school visits?

I do many author visits in schools from kindergarten to high school. As an avid champion of using picture books with older readers, I find that my books allow me to work with students of all ages because there are elements in the books that will appeal to them. Younger students enjoy the stories and like learning about the Chinese cultural heritage. I use the books with older students as springboards for discussing racism, disasters, sexism, patriarchal societies, Chinese Americans, and cultural values and differences. When I visit schools, I bring along the little shoes that belonged to my great grandmother, who had bound feet. Students respond to those little shoes after they have held them in their hands to see how small they are. They cannot believe grown women had feet only 4 inches long in China. I use slides of the 12 square blocks of Pre World War II San Francisco Chinatown to give students a feeling of living in a small area, a ghetto within a city. Hispanic students have told me they didn’t know that the Chinese had faced these types of discrimination and immigration problems. I tell them the Hispanics just happen to be the latest group to try to come to America, and that America is a land of many immigrants. Learning about the lives of those who came before us is important so that we can acknowledge them, then move on to live the lives they couldn’t.