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Lily Xiao, the 12-year-old protagonist of local author Nicole Chen’s latest novel, “Lily Xiao Speaks Out,” is a model student, the favorite of every teacher for her hard work and always-perfect behavior (her peers call her the class robot). At home, she’s obedient to her Taiwanese immigrant parents and beloved grandmother, and her family pressures her to prioritize her studies ahead of everything else and never rock the boat when it comes to authority figures. The year is 1993, and shy Lily has a big dream – to sing and play guitar in a grunge band.
While she reconciles her love of rock with her anxiety about making herself heard and subverting expectations, she’s also working to help her best friend and cousin Vivian, who’s just moved from Taiwan and is struggling to keep up in her new, English-only school. When she realizes that her district is failing to meet the needs of plenty of other English language learners just like Vivian, Lily is challenged to face her fears, channel her hidden punk-rock spirit, gain greater insights into her family, and stand up for what she believes in.
“Lily feels a bit like me rewriting my history if I was 12 in the 1990s again,” Chen said. “I was basically Lily in the sense of, I was a straight A student, I kind of did what I was told.”
In Lily, she created a character that represents the middle schooler she’d liked to have been, and that she hopes can inspire young readers.
“I wanted to showcase an Asian American girl who speaks up and stands up for what she wants. I wish I had taken some of that privilege I had and actually taken it out for a spin and made change happen, and challenged some rules, meaningful rules,” Chen said. “Turn that model minority stereotype on its head.”
In the book, Lily is met with microaggressions from classmates who assume someone like her would only listen to classical music and play the violin or piano.
“I wanted to write Lily as breaking the stereotype,” Chen said. She also gives Lily a crucial role model in the form of Keiko, a Japanese American college student who leads a local all-female grunge band and shows Lily what’s possible. Characters like Keiko show “the importance of representation in media, and the profound impact it could have,” she said.
Growing up, “alternative rock was the music that I really gravitated toward; the bigness, the boldness, the angst,” she recalled. “Back then it was heavily dominated by white men. It didn’t occur to me that I could pick up a guitar and play one day.”
And while Chen may not have realized it at the time, a rock band made up of girls a grade ahead of her playing a gig at their Palo Alto middle school did make a lasting impression. That group went on to become well known as The Donnas, standing out in the male-dominated rock scene, and Chen pays tribute to the band by naming some of Keiko’s bandmates after them.
“I actually lived across the street from one of them. I didn’t realize at the time how important that was,” she said, of witnessing the group’s early days. “As an adult I was like, ‘Wow, that was a really big deal what they did, what they were trying to do.'”
Chen moved to Palo Alto from Milpitas when she was 8, attending Duveneck Elementary School as a third grader. She went on to Jordan Middle School (now Greene) and Palo Alto High School and when it was time for college, she went “across the street” to Stanford University.
She now resides in Menlo Park, while her parents still live in Palo Alto. Chen has an 8-year-old daughter who she said is her biggest supporter, and helps her stay in touch with the world of childhood as she continues her writing journey.
“It’s a lot of fun to watch and listen to kids talk, what they care about,” she said.
During her own childhood, Chen was more into art than writing and has spent her career on the design side of things (she currently works for Netflix as a product researcher).
Her journey toward becoming an author started in the summer of 2018, when she wanted a break from her day job and a chance to try something new. She jumped into taking writing classes and attending workshops. Then came the pandemic.
“A lot of anti-Asian hate surfaced during COVID. I didn’t expect that. That actually shook me quite a bit,” she said. She thought, “OK, the way I’m going to deal with this is, I want to show us Asian Americans as Americans, not as foreign people,” while at the same time telling stories “more specific to me and my culture and my experience. I felt that fire. I started to have more of a purpose.”
As she tells readers, “I write Asian American books that are joyful, that are relatable,” she said. “You don’t have to be Asian American to love boba, to love your family, but I also want them to showcase my culture, and that can be in very subtle ways” – such as having her protagonist eat green onion pancakes for breakfast – “and there are obviously bigger ways, too.”
Before the pandemic, “I thought it would be fun to start writing a story,” she said. “When COVID happened I was like, ‘I think I need to write a story.'”
Her first published picture book, “How We Say I Love You” (illustrated by Lenny Wen) came out in 2022.
That book “very much harkens to my experience growing up,” she said. It follows a young Taiwanese American girl who, as she goes about her day, sees her family members expressing their love for one another through actions rather than words.
“My parents immigrated from Taiwan in the ’80s,” Chen said. “I think they still haven’t said ‘I love you to me,’ but when this book came out they bought, like, 100 copies,” she said. “I know they do in fact love me,” and the book is an homage to that strong bond that’s shown rather than spoken aloud.
Though she still adores picture books, her literary agent suggested she consider trying middle grade novels as well. Despite never imagining herself as a novelist, “I fell in love with the genre and format,” she said. Books for middle grade readers (aimed at kids roughly ages 8-12) “are so lovely,” she said. “It’s such a formative time for kids trying to find out who they are.”
Her first middle grade novel, “It’s Boba Time For Pearl Li!” came out last year and tells the tale of entrepreneurial Pearl, who works to save her favorite boba shop by selling her handmade amigurumi dolls while also struggling to fit in as a crafty kid in a tech-centric family.
There are aspects of Chen in Pearl, as there are in Lily.
“I’ve always been very crafty and yet I work in the tech field,” she noted. “It felt like just a passionate topic for me to write about.” And, like Pearl, “I love cute stuff, too!”
Boba Time, the shop in the book, is actually modeled after an old favorite tea shop in Cupertino, and its eccentric, loveable tea maker became the basis for the quirky Auntie Cha in the book. “She’d make drinks with a passion,” Chen said. In fact, while both novels take place in fictional California towns (“Pacific Park” and nearby “Sunnydale”), they’re definitely rooted in Chen’s Peninsula life. Pacific Park’s city motto will be awfully familiar to Redwood City residents, for example.
“I like to sneak in those little references,” she said. “A couple little local Easter eggs.”
More information is available at storiesbynicolechen.com/.
This just reaffirms to me: upper middle school students, deserve to Have A Say in how their public schools are run. [Policy, School Site Councils in MVWSD middle schools ‘can have’ and “should have” a student-elected formal representative on these councils.]. What parents/teachers/administrators do-not-see, kids may very well see (as in the story).