Meet-the-Author Recording with Minh Lê
Drawn Together |
Minh Lê introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating Drawn Together.
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Minh Lê: Hello, this is Minh Le, and I'm the author of "Drawn Together" illustrated by Dan Santat. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I came to write this book, and then I'll share an excerpt with you. So this book is inspired very much by my own life, and my relationship with my grandparents. So I'm Vietnamese-American. But I was born here. And while Vietnamese was my first language, I unfortunately let it slip along the way. So I spoke Vietnamese at my best when I was probably four-years old. So, at the opening of this book it starts with a grandson going to visit his grandfather, and they have dinner, but they struggle to connect through language because they don't speak the same language fluently. And those early scenes are very much taken from my life. There's a lot of warmth and affection there, but there's still struggle to connect.
So I wanted to write a book that both captured the struggles of having that kind of communication barrier, and that language gap, and age and cultural gap as well, but also capture the depth of feeling, and the emotion that was still there with a relationship that was deeper than words. While the two characters struggle to connect, it isn't until they discover a mutual love of art that they finally are able to bridge that divide. So the grandson and grandfather, after struggling to connect, the boy goes off and grabs a sketchpad and he starts to draw. And when the grandfather sees this, he runs off to his room and gets his own sketchpad and comes back. And that's when they realize they have that common ground. So I'll read you an excerpt now.
The boy says, "right when I gave up on talking, my grandfather surprised me by revealing a world beyond words. And in a flash we see each other for the first time". So in the book, the boy is drawing a picture of himself as a wizard, it was one of the heroes of his imagination. And when the grandfather comes back, you turn the page and you see that he's drawn a picture of himself as a Thai warrior, and like one of the heroes from his imagination. So the two characters then go off and build a world together through their drawings. And while I'm Vietnamese-American, Dan, the illustrator is Thai-American. And so he brought his own cultural experience to this, and in a very beautiful way. So then the boy is the wizard, and the grandfather as the warrior, go off and create this world together, and are able to bridge the divide the had been separating them before.
This Meet-the-Author Recording with Minh Lê was exclusively created in by TeachingBooks with thanks to Disney-Hyperion.