Finally Seen by Kelly Yang
Can we read? No. 101: From guest writer Dana Gaskin Wenig
As I announced in March, once a month between now and October 2023, Dana Gaskin Wenig will take my place in your inbox and share her own extensive knowledge of, experience with, insight into, and love of children’s literature.
She kicked things off with an excellent introductory post about the Moomins and the adventure of everyday life, which you should read, right this very moment, if you haven’t already.
I won’t take any more time introducing her: here’s Dana with her next post…
“When there are enough books available that can act as both mirrors and windows for all our children, they will see that we can celebrate both our differences and our similarities, because together they are what make us all human.”
—Rudine Sims Bishop, Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors
It would have been perfect if a librarian had handed me Kelly Yang’s most recent book Finally Seen (2023), both because it’s a love letter to librarians (and teachers, especially ESL teachers) and because Yang is the Honorary Chair of the American Library Association for National Library Week (April 23-29). Perhaps just as good (in my book), Rene, a local, independent bookseller (and head of Third Place Books children’s books department in Seattle) introduced me to Kelly Yang’s work last year.
Lina Gao is the heroine of Finally Seen, Yang’s latest. We meet Lina in Beijing, China, where she lives with her aging grandmother. Her parents and little sister moved to Los Angeles, California, when Lina was five, and Lina was left behind. She has a lot of big, complicated feelings about this, not just longing to be reunited with her parents and little sister, but anger and confusion about why her parents made the choices they did. Lina misses her family in the U.S. terribly and wants to join them, but she has been helping care for her grandmother and feels responsible for her, and she loves her very much.
When Lina arrives at LAX airport to live with her parents and sister, she is brimming with visions of the American dream: Frappuccinos, mounds of pillows, and saying “I love you, all the time, to your family. And not being embarrassed.” School is difficult for her because she can understand quite a lot of English, but speaking it is another matter, and her classmates (except her friend Finn), make fun of her. This silences her. Luckily the school librarian takes a special interest in Lina, and her ESL teacher, Mrs. Ortiz, makes a special connection with her.
In school, Lina doesn’t speak to anyone but Finn and Mrs. Ortiz. But when she meets homeschooled Carla Isabella Muñoz at the organic farm where her father works, she feels comfortable risking language mistakes with her. Her circle is widening. Carla and her mom are traveling the world working as WWOOFers (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), and work long hours for no pay. Lina’s dad is a microbiologist in China, but here he works for an organic regenerative farmer named Pete. Pete is a very complicated character, and at first, I just didn’t like him. But the story unfolds in a way that allowed me to feel compassion for him, something Yang is very good at in her books. She tackles tough subjects in a way that makes them so readable.
The characters in Yang’s books are finely drawn. She has a knack for writing the popular girl, the grumpy organic farmer, the privileged-parent-with-a-parking space at Lina’s grade school as ultimately complex, flawed, and relatable as the people we recognize from our daily lives. We may not like them, but we know them; they’re human. She generously shares the innermost thoughts, feelings, and fears of her characters, which allows every character, and every story, to make that alchemical jump from the personal (her stories are largely based on her own experiences) to the universal.
I started reading/listening to (same thing) Finally Seen on Libro.fm (an alternative to Audible that allows users to support their favorite independent bookstore) in my car and then before sleep (though the suspense sometimes kept me awake!) Like a lot of middle-grade chapter books, this one does have some suspense. Things are left hanging at the ends of chapters, characters don’t always get what they want when they want it, and some folks in the book don’t behave well. That’s just real. Yang’s ability to tell a good story is undeniable, but she does so much more than that. She includes everyone, and even the people I didn’t like initially, I found compassion for, because she weaves in context for behavior. She’s not making excuses for bad behavior; she’s reminding us of how humans are.
Finally Seen is the story of a family finding its way back to each other, about the challenges immigrants to the U.S. face every day, about what it’s like to go to a school where no one speaks your first language, and how amazing ESL teachers and librarians are. It’s also about finding one’s voice, the importance of graphic novels, being friends with boys, navigating friendships, and how it feels to be: finally seen.
After three years of living through the pandemic, families all over the world are likely familiar with the challenges of maintaining connection over distance, either short- or long-term, and many people have had to carry more responsibility than is comfortable. It’s not necessary to know the backstory, but it speaks to Yang’s generosity as a writer that she writes from personal experience when she writes about family separation. She and her family made the hard choice to live on different continents recently — she took one child, the other two lived with her husband so that she could support her mother during cancer treatment. She has lived what she’s writing about.
The first Kelly Yang book I read, Front Desk (2018), is the first in her five-book series about Mia Yang, a ten-year-old girl who immigrates from China to the U.S. with her parents and works with them running the front desk of a hotel in Los Angeles, a story based on Kelly Yang’s own life. (I wrote about it here.) Yang has two more stand-alone middle-grade readers and two books written for young adults. The chapter books are suggested for ages eight to twelve, but I read chapter books to my (now grown) daughter from the time she was patient enough to do without illustrations. We read at her pace and eventually she took the books out of my hands and kept reading on her own when she was ready.
Front Desk was challenged in Pennsylvania in 2021 (a precursor to banning), and Yang says she wrote Finally Seen in response to that experience. And boy, does she respond, but in such a subtle and holistic way that I didn’t pick it up entirely until close to the end. Madeleine L’Engle, another beloved children’s book author, said, “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.” L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time is on the American Library Association’s 100 most banned children’s books. Luckily L’Engle’s books, and Yang’s, are written for children, and children understand every word.
Front Desk ended up not being banned (though parents in the school district where it was challenged can opt their child out of reading the book if they so choose), but Yang was incensed and heartbroken that the book she wrote, based on her own lived experience, which she shared to give people who look like her a mirror, to give people who don’t look like her a window into a life like hers, would face the specter of banning. So, she started writing again, and she has been publishing more than a book per year since Front Desk came out, and Finally Seen is the book that grew from that seed.
I finished this book in hardcover on the plane to Los Angeles to see my grown daughter a few weeks ago and was startled to find myself crying behind my mask. Every Kelly Yang book I read teaches me something about lives I didn’t live, and I love that! But suddenly, the book became a mirror: I saw the child I was, growing up in two different intentional communities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, never feeling quite at home in either community or the culture I live in now.
Certainly, I’m not the demographic this book was written for, but I felt deeply seen. That’s part of the gift of inclusive stories: they include all of us.
Dana Gaskin Wenig is a writer, writing teacher, and former bookseller. She lives in the Seattle area.
Thank you for sharing. It is so important to include books like this in classrooms, libraries, and our homes to teach acceptance, understand and inclusion. Thank you for sharing as this book is new to me. I can't wait to read it.