Seeing People, Not Differences

When I first started writing The Fire Horse Girl, I obsessed over getting all the details right. The book opens on Chinese New Year, and I combed through every New Year tradition I could find and jammed most of them into the first chapter (don’t worry, Cheryl Klein, editor extraordinaire, saved readers from that monstrosity). I meticulously researched clothing, mannerisms, language patterns, traditions, and other cultural nuances because people said that these differences were important.

There’s another reason I obsessed over differences. While I was writing The Fire Horse Girl, I was also in the process of adopting our son Jack. At the time, he was a three-year old little boy who I’d only seen in six pictures his orphanage in China sent. Between filling out immigration applications, fielding questions about why adoption took so long, and daydreaming about the day we would finally bring him home, I…