3D characters, a murder at sea, and this week's events!
Hello, friends!
The Blue Stoop event with Nicole Chung was great! The book is about her journey to track down her birth/bio parents, interspersed with memories about her life as a Korean-American adopted by white parents, attending a predominately white school in a predominately white town in Oregon. In particular, I appreciated the nuance and complexity in her retelling of these experiences -- the conflict between wanting to be a "good adoptee" and wanting answers to the (often offensive) questions coming from her childhood peers. (More info about Nicole's life here. You can buy her book here.)
I was interested in attending the event both because a) I want to go to more Blue Stoop things! They're good programmers and doing to the legwork to build a local lit community! And, because b) one of the main characters in my novel is a transracial adoptee grappling with alienation from both his white family and his more culturally-connected Korean-American peers.
As a white, fairly privileged a…