Bird and Margaret’s world isn’t exactly our world, but it isn’t not ours, either. Most of the events and occurrences in this book do not have direct analogues, but I drew inspiration from many real-life events, both past and current—and in some cases, things I’d imagined had become realities by the time the novel was done. Margaret Atwood once wrote of The Handmaid’s Tale, “If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to be real,” so what follows is a list of just a few of the real toads—and conversely, the beacons of hope—that shaped my thinking as I wrote.
There is a long history, in the U.S. and elsewhere, of removing children as a means of political control. If this strikes a nerve with you—as I hope it does—please learn more about the many instances, both past and ongoing, in which children have been taken from their families: the separations of enslaved families, government boarding schools for Indigenous children （such as that in Carlisle, PA）， the inequities built into the foster care system, the separations of migrant families still occurring at the U.S.’s southern border, and beyond. Much more attention needs to be brought to this subject, but Laura Briggs’s Taking Children: A History of American Terror gives an invaluable overview.
The pandemic that began in 2020 brought a sharp increase in anti-Asian discrimination, but this isn’t a new phenomenon, either: such discrimination has long and deep roots in American history. As I wrote this novel, real-life examples were never far from my mind—including Japanese American internment during World War II, Vincent Chin’s 1982 murder, and the Department of Justice’s long-running “China Initiative,” among many others. If you’re new to this subject and want to learn more, I hope you’ll look at The Making of Asian America, by Erika Lee; Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats; Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II, by Richard Reeves; and From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement, by Paula Yoo, as a few starting points. New books on Asian American experience are being written every year, and I’m grateful to those illuminating the many facets of this complex and ever-expanding topic.
I’m fascinated by the way folktales and language are both remembered and slowly altered as they’re passed between generations—and how we find different meanings in them depending on the circumstances we’re in. The version of “Sleeping Beauty” that Bird recalls is from The Illustrated Junior Library’s Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the volume I had growing up, and throughout the book, Margaret tells Bird a mix of Western and Asian stories that I remember from my own childhood. The Japanese folktale at the center of this novel was popularized in English by Lafcadio Hearn in 1898 and has been retold many times over the years; the version in this novel, with all its variations, is my own. On the language side: the Online Etymology Dictionary, various message boards on linguistics, and my father’s research on the history of Chinese characters were invaluable in inspiring Ethan’s etymologies, though any errors Ethan makes are of course mine alone.
Inspirations for some of the protests in the novel came from widespread sources—in general, the concept of guerrilla art was a guiding light, as were Gene Sharp’s writings on nonviolent protest. The knitted web in the Common is based on various pacifist yarn-bombings around the U.S. and the U.K., while the ice children in Nashville have their seeds in the surprise overnight installations of statues, such as the nude Donald Trump statues created by INDECLINE to protest his policies, and the haunting depictions of caged children that were planted by the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services （RAICES） to draw attention to migrant family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the nonviolent protests of the Serbian Otpor! movement, Syrian anti-Assad protestors, and other groups, especially as described so vividly in Blueprint for Revolution, by Srdja Popovi?, sparked the ideas for the cement block and crowbar in Austin, the ping-pong balls in Memphis, and Margaret’s bottle caps, as well as influencing the overall spirit of all the art protests. The struggles of prodemocracy Hong Kongers, particularly against the recent China-imposed “national security” legislation, were always on my mind as well. I am also deeply grateful to Anna Deavere Smith, whose work I discovered only after completing this book but who nevertheless is clearly one of the foremothers of Margaret’s project.