Name: Jen Sookfong Lee

Website: sookfong.com

Asian background: Chinese

What is it about your experience and upbringing that inspired you the most to write? 

The Chinese Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Act in Canada, which effectively kept my family separated for close to 40 years during the first half of the 20th century, was really the flashpoint for most of my fiction. And moving forward as I write in other genres, that flashpoint has morphed into themes of intergenerational trauma, identity, and marginalization. 

Name 3 authors and 3 books

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

What do you think is the best quality a writer can have?

Resilience. The writing process and the publishing industry will wear a writer down, and you need that ability to get back up when things push you down. 

Any last words? (Fun facts, comments, something you’d like to share with the world, etc.) 

Hold your community (however you define it) close! They will help you through everything.

Challenge: Write a one-sentence story! 
When I woke up, I knew I had been dreaming about a wedding, about a white dress, a limousine driving through the fallen cherry blossoms, the sky clear and endless, and I also knew, with a heavy certainty, that this was a real life impossibility.