In Gloria Chao’s “When You Wish Upon a Lantern,” wishes don’t magically come true. They are received with kindness, guided, and often painstakingly maneuvered “into the light.”
Born and raised in Chicago’s Chinatown, Liya Huang and Kai Jiang are childhood best friends whose families harbor a mutual dislike not unlike the Montagues and Capulets – if the Montagues and Capulets were passive-aggressive and dueled with their children instead of weapons. Still, Liya and Kai share a tender friendship (without spoiling anything, Kai “is a cinnamon roll who can *make* cinnamon rolls) – until The Great Misunderstanding distorts their budding romantic interest into a series of awkward misunderstandings.
The tension between the Huangs and Jiangs is further strained by the passing of their peacekeeper, Liya’s grandmother Nainai. Much of this book is colored by this shared grief: Nainai had been a dearly beloved character. For the past few years, she and Liya had secretly read and granted the wishes that patrons had written on lanterns purchased at the Huang family’s shop. “I don’t know if there’s anything they wouldn’t do for the community,” Kai observes. “[They team together] to bring others happiness.”
After her death, Liya vows to carry on her legacy, and Kai offers to help as a way to keep them close after The Great Misunderstanding. This wish-granting carries their shared narrative, as well as the ways each of them try to negotiate their own difficult families.
Chao’s novel honors Chinese folklore through traditions like the Qixi Festival, but what resonated most was her attention to the experiences of an intergenerational Chinese and Taiwanese American community, particularly those living within an enclave like Chinatown. Her characters come alive through details like a sweet woman in her eighties who is so proud to be from Taiwan that she wears a necklace with a pendant the shape of that island (sound familiar?); a shushu who charts his own son’s trajectory of possibilities on Jeremy Lin’s blueprint (“Did you know Jeremy Lin went to Harvard and studied economics? He pursued his dreams but still got a good education. He did it all!”).
I also loved contextualizing my reading of When You Wish Upon a Lantern with a personal essay Chao shared with us earlier in the year. “[Writing] also helped me understand myself better. I wrote about the challenges I was personally going through, and my characters question their identity and what it means to be Taiwanese American,” she wrote. “By writing from different perspectives, it helped me work through some of my struggles. As each of my characters learned how to accept, love, and reconcile their two sides, I began joining those pieces of myself together, too.”
Her thoughtful self-reflection, articulated through beautiful and imperfect characters, is such a strength of her fiction.
Acclaimed author Gloria Chao creates real-world magic in this luminous romance about teens who devote themselves to granting other people’s wishes but are too afraid to let themselves have their own hearts’ desires–each other.
Liya and Kai had been best friends since they were little kids, but all that changed when a humiliating incident sparked The Biggest Misunderstanding of All Time–and they haven’t spoken since.
Then Liya discovers her family’s wishing lantern store is struggling, and she decides to resume a tradition she had with her beloved late grandmother: secretly fulfilling the wishes people write on the lanterns they send into the sky. It may boost sales and save the store, but she can’t do it alone . . . and Kai is the only one who cares enough to help.
While working on their covert missions, Liya and Kai rekindle their friendship–and maybe more. But when their feuding families and changing futures threaten to tear them apart again, can they find a way to make their own wishes come true?
More from Gloria:
‘When You Wish Upon a Lantern’ Tells a Magical Chinese American Story | Interview with Asia Pacific Arts
How writing novels helped me learn more about what it means to be Taiwanese American | Gloria Chao for TaiwaneseAmerican.org
Gloria Chao is an acclaimed author and screenwriter. Her novels include AMERICAN PANDA, OUR WAYWARD FATE, RENT A BOYFRIEND, and WHEN YOU WISH UPON A LANTERN. Her award-winning books have received starred trade reviews; were Junior Library Guild Selections, Indie Next Picks, YALSA teens’ top 10 Pick, Amelia Bloomer list selections; and were featured on the “Best of” lists of Seventeen, Bustle, Barnes & Noble, PopSugar, Paste Magazine, Booklist, Chicago Public Library, Bank Street, and more.
After a brief detour as a dentist, she is now grateful to spend her days in fictional characters’ heads instead of real people’s mouths. When she’s not writing, you can find her on the curling ice, where she and her husband are world-ranked in mixed doubles.
Visit her tea-and-book-filled world at GloriaChao.wordpress.com and find her on Twitter and Instagram @GloriacChao.
Four starred reviews for this incisive, laugh-out-loud contemporary debut about a Taiwanese-American teen whose parents want her to be a doctor and marry a Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer despite her squeamishness with germs and crush on a Japanese classmate.
At seventeen, Mei should be in high school, but skipping fourth grade was part of her parents’ master plan. Now a freshman at MIT, she is on track to fulfill the rest of this predetermined future: become a doctor, marry a preapproved Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer, produce a litter of babies.
With everything her parents have sacrificed to make her cushy life a reality, Mei can’t bring herself to tell them the truth–that she (1) hates germs, (2) falls asleep in biology lectures, and (3) has a crush on her classmate Darren Takahashi, who is decidedly not Taiwanese.
But when Mei reconnects with her brother, Xing, who is estranged from the family for dating the wrong woman, Mei starts to wonder if all the secrets are truly worth it. Can she find a way to be herself, whoever that is, before her web of lies unravels?
From debut author Gloria Chao comes a hilarious, heartfelt tale of how, unlike the panda, life isn’t always so black and white.
A teen outcast is simultaneously swept up in a whirlwind romance and down a rabbit hole of dark family secrets when another Taiwanese family moves to her small, predominantly white midwestern town in this remarkable novel from the critically acclaimed author of American Panda.
Seventeen-year-old Ali Chu knows that as the only Asian person at her school in middle-of-nowhere Indiana, she must be bland as white toast to survive. This means swapping her congee lunch for PB&Js, ignoring the clueless racism from her classmates and teachers, and keeping her mouth shut when people wrongly call her Allie instead of her actual name, pronounced Āh-lěe, after the mountain in Taiwan.
Her autopilot existence is disrupted when she finds out that Chase Yu, the new kid in school, is also Taiwanese. Despite some initial resistance due to the “they belong together” whispers, Ali and Chase soon spark a chemistry rooted in competitive martial arts, joking in two languages, and, most importantly, pushing back against the discrimination they face.
But when Ali’s mom finds out about the relationship, she forces Ali to end it. As Ali covertly digs into the why behind her mother’s disapproval, she uncovers secrets about her family and Chase that force her to question everything she thought she knew about life, love, and her unknowable future.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before meets The Farewell in this “entertaining and nuanced” (Kirkus Reviews) romantic comedy about a college student who hires a fake boyfriend to appease her traditional Taiwanese parents, to disastrous results, from the acclaimed author of American Panda.
Chloe Wang is nervous to introduce her parents to her boyfriend, because the truth is, she hasn’t met him yet either. She hired him from Rent for Your ‘Rents, a company specializing in providing fake boyfriends trained to impress even the most traditional Asian parents.
Drew Chan’s passion is art, but after his parents cut him off for dropping out of college to pursue his dreams, he became a Rent for Your ‘Rents employee to keep a roof over his head. Luckily, learning protocols like “Type C parents prefer quiet, kind, zero-PDA gestures” comes naturally to him.
When Chloe rents Drew, the mission is simple: convince her parents fake Drew is worthy of their approval so they’ll stop pressuring her to accept a proposal from Hongbo, the wealthiest (and slimiest) young bachelor in their tight-knit Asian American community.
But when Chloe starts to fall for the real Drew–who, unlike his fake persona, is definitely not ‘rent-worthy–her carefully curated life begins to unravel. Can she figure out what she wants before she loses everything?
Acclaimed author Gloria Chao creates real-world magic in this luminous romance about teens who devote themselves to granting other people’s wishes but are too afraid to let themselves have their own hearts’ desires–each other.
Liya and Kai had been best friends since they were little kids, but all that changed when a humiliating incident sparked The Biggest Misunderstanding of All Time–and they haven’t spoken since.
Then Liya discovers her family’s wishing lantern store is struggling, and she decides to resume a tradition she had with her beloved late grandmother: secretly fulfilling the wishes people write on the lanterns they send into the sky. It may boost sales and save the store, but she can’t do it alone . . . and Kai is the only one who cares enough to help.
While working on their covert missions, Liya and Kai rekindle their friendship–and maybe more. But when their feuding families and changing futures threaten to tear them apart again, can they find a way to make their own wishes come true?
Leave a Reply