Transforming Memory Into Storytelling: Cindy Chang in conversation with Jocelyn Chung

It requires vulnerability and courage to transform memories into storytelling. Especially when those memories are mixed with pain and shame. For many of us, growing up Taiwanese American meant learning to save face. We hold our secrets deep inside of ourselves, carefully crafting the image we want others to perceive. We do this for survival, we do this to grasp normalcy, or maybe we do this because it’s all we know how to do.

I had the honor of speaking with Cindy Chang about her new book, “How To Draw A Secret”. In her semi-autobiographical graphic novel, she tells the story of a Taiwanese American girl, named Cindy, who relishes creating flawless images. Cindy is confronted by an art contest prompt: “What family means to me.” The problem is, no one at school can know that Cindy’s dad moved back to Taiwan four years ago, so Cindy sketches out the perfect plan to draw the perfect picture while keeping her parents’ separation secret. An unexpected trip to Taipei reveals devastating new secrets, and suddenly everything from her art to her family is falling apart. Cindy then must figure out how to draw from her heart and share her secrets.

As someone who also grew up with separated parents and my dad living abroad, I resonated deeply with Cindy’s story and felt a soothing balm to my own inner child after hearing Cindy’s creative process for this 6-year-long project. May we all find courage in our own ways, like Cindy, to transform the most painful parts of our memories into storytelling that invites others to feel less alone. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

The below interview is a transcript of a conversation between fellow illustrator-writers Jocelyn Chung and Cindy Chang (yes — truly a dream pairing!).

Jocelyn Chung: Hello to everyone tuning in. My name is Jocelyn Chung and today I have the pleasure of inviting you into a conversation with myself and Cindy Chang.

Cindy is a Taiwanese-American author-illustrator, digital product/brand designer, and design leader currently based in the SF Bay Area. She loves tea, pastries, and storytelling for kids big and small. She supports children in expanding their connection to themselves and the world around them so they can find their voices, dream and achieve their dreams, and build a better tomorrow together. She studied Human-Computer Interaction and Learning, Design, and Technology at Stanford, and currently leads product design & brand design at Glean. Her debut semi-autobiographical graphic novel, HOW TO DRAW A SECRET, was just released Feb 4, 2025 with Harper Collins / Allida.

And so with that, I am so happy to introduce Cindy. First of all, congratulations to you on your book release! And even though I just read a little intro to your background, can you share a little more about yourself with us, where you grew up, and where you live now?

Cindy Chang: Thank you, Jocelyn. It’s so great to be here with you. And I really appreciate this opportunity and it’s so lovely to be able to chat with you. Yeah, so I grew up in the SF area where I also currently live. I have been fortunate enough to stay in the Bay Area most of my whole life, other than living abroad in Dublin, Ireland for about two years for work. I feel lucky for the weather, I guess!

Jocelyn Chung: Whoa, Dublin. With your job, what brought you out to Dublin?

Cindy Chang: I was working for a company called Intercom and they’re an Irish company. They were founded in the US (in SF) but their R&D department was based in Dublin. I moved out there by myself for about two years, and it was a really great opportunity just to experience Europe, dive into all things work related, but also non-work, and just kind of experience living abroad for a little bit.

Jocelyn Chung: I have so many questions, but I don’t want to get distracted from why we’re here, but that’s so cool. I first wanted to ask you a little bit before you share a little background on the inspiration of your book. What does Taiwanese American identity mean to you? And also, can you share a little bit about the inspiration behind How to Draw a Secret?

Cindy Chang: Taiwanese American identity is a part of who I am. Growing up in the Bay Area, I was lucky to be surrounded by other children of immigrants and Taiwanese American friends. It felt normal in many ways and comforting to be in a community with shared experiences, cultural events, and people who understood. That definitely made things easier at times.

As for the inspiration behind How to Draw a Secret, the story is based on my own family and experiences growing up with parental separation and the complicated emotions that come with it. As a kid, you don’t always know how to process those situations. Things might not feel normal, but you also don’t have the vocabulary to express what you’re feeling.

I knew since elementary school that I wanted to write and illustrate books. I don’t know if this was the case for you, but in my school, we did a lot of book projects, writing, and drawing, and I loved it. I loved story time, entered young authors’ fairs, and thought, This is fun—I want to keep doing this. It became a big part of my identity since I was a shy kid. I had been trying to break into publishing for a while, ever since college, where I took a class on making picture books, and later while working full-time.

In the summer of 2019, I took a short sabbatical from my job to focus on my picture book portfolio. I needed structure, so I joined an online group with activities and prompts to stay accountable. The month I joined, the prompt was to create two graphic novel pages about a childhood story. That got me thinking about this book. One of the scenes I drew during that exercise actually made it into the final story.

Around the same time, I attended an SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) conference in LA, where Meg Medina gave a talk about digging into childhood memories. She asked us to think about the questions we had at eight, ten, or twelve that we never found answers to.

And basically, like, all these things like signs kept pointing to this story. It was really just something that I wanted to tell because it was a secret for most of my life, and so I felt like it was something that I was both like, deeply scared and excited to tell at the same time. And that’s in a way how I knew that I had to find a way to tell the story.

Jocelyn Chung: Wow, it really sounds like every single path and every step that you took down this path, like ever since you were small has led you to telling this specific story. It’s so beautiful. Like from when you were small, feeling so drawn to storytelling and like picture books and then like step by step, like the learning and the curiosity, like leading you further and further down this path.

That’s really exciting to hear. And also just a beautiful testament to your own natural ability to [tell stories.] It sounds like this story really flowed out of you in a very natural way. That leads me to my next question, which is that in this book the art contest prompt that little Cindy– I’m going to call her little Cindy, if that’s okay.

Little Cindy is at an art contest, and the prompt is what family means to me and this becomes a pivotal moment in the story for her. And you are sharing, like, how this mirrored your own life, but did the confrontation of your understanding of your family mirror that exact experience?

Or was it [an] adult experience that you had that was mirrored in the book that you experienced? And how has your understanding of your family also evolved over time?

Cindy Chang: That’s a very good question. In a way, I was trying to write the book I wish I had at the time. Going through this experience as a kid, we never talked about it, and I didn’t read anything that made me feel like I could share or relate. Looking back, I realize it happens all the time.

While working on the book, I had to shift some timelines around. The character Cindy is much braver than I was at the time. I don’t think I reached that level of understanding until I was an adult. What family means has continued to evolve for me, especially as I’ve gotten older and had a child—that changes your perspective. Reconnecting with family members at different stages of life also shapes that understanding.

A lot of this process was me working through and processing things. In a way, I used this book and art as a way to heal and deepen my own understanding.

Jocelyn Chung: Yeah. It’s so interesting that way, huh? Picture books are intended for kids, but the process of [writing and reading them] is healing our inner child or even hoping— I love how you said maybe she was braver. The character is braver than how you maybe had been. But there is a healing in going back to those memories and reliving them and then deciding different choices that you wish that you had the bravery to make at the time. I think that’s something I love about picture books, but that’s so beautiful that you got to experience that through the retelling of this story.

Cindy Chang: Yeah, definitely. I think there’s definitely a lot of truth in that for sure.

Jocelyn Chung: Something that really drew me to your story when I was looking it up was just the fact that this centers around hiding the separation of your parents (or little Cindy’s parents) and this idea that she’s hiding behind wanting to present this perfect image of a family that’s together, but this internal conflict [of] the reality that her dad was living abroad in Taiwan at the time. As someone else who also grew up with my parents being separated and also feeling a lot of internal and external shame and hiddenness to this feeling– my dad also was living abroad for most of my life, I related so much to the complexity of the themes. I really wish, even just in reading the intro to your story, I wish that I had this when I was younger because I would have felt so seen in my own secrets and my own shame that I was carrying. How did you decide to approach the portrayal of family separation, especially in a way that was sensitive to but still relatable to young readers? And also what is your hope in portraying this in a Taiwanese American context?

Cindy Chang: In working on this book, I was pretty honest. When I was starting to work on it, it was really just reflecting and remembering things and looking back at like journals and just reliving that in a way. So the portrayal is really my lived experience.

And so I think there’s a lot of things that are very specific in terms of my Taiwanese American identity or things—like how my family communicated, or like the little details about how we lived. But I think hopefully it’s also general or relatable enough to be seen in a way that young readers of all kinds or like older readers, can relate to.

So much of what I’ve experienced was very hush hush, and you don’t talk about it. But the more I share the story, or the more that others engage with it, you discover that someone else also had a parent who lived abroad or this other big secret that they had never really told.

I also wanted to explore the idea that everyone is dealing with more than what meets the eye. We all wear multiple identities—one at school, one at home, one when we’re alone. In this book, the character Cindy navigates all of that, and she uses her journal for her inner self where she processes things. With a complex topic like parental separation, where there really are so many different angles where it’s like a prism of some kind, I wanted to be able to have the opportunity to explore this topic in a lot of different settings and facets.

Jocelyn Chung: Did you feel like because there were so many different facets or maybe like the unspoken mannerisms and also different environments, that a graphic novel was the best format for this? Or was there a different multiverse where this book was going to be a picture book or, a long form book? Did you always know that to be graphic novel?

Cindy Chang: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think I had a fairly good sense that I wanted it to be a graphic novel.

When I was growing up, I actually didn’t read too many graphic novels. I don’t think they were really a thing. Like I read comics like Garfield, and these Journey to the West comics that were really funny and good. But that was probably the only really [comic book] thing that I read.

But in 2017, I went to the Cartoon Art Museum. This is actually when I was living abroad in Ireland and I came back for a business trip. I’ve always heard great things about the Cartoon Art Museum, but it had never been, and it’s in SF. It so happened that when I went, Raina Telgemeier‘s work was up there. She had a whole exhibit about the art behind “Smile” and “Sisters,” and I spent hours in there, and I just read all the books afterward too, and I was just so inspired. There was this moment where I was like, “Oh, I want to be able to try to do this someday”.

This graphic novel format, the more I discovered and read, the more that I really fell in love with the medium because I think there’s so much with the storytelling and many tools that you have at your disposal. So it’s really like a fun puzzle. You have a lot of panels, but you can change up the shape, or you can make them have no border, and there’s page turns and layout and just so many different tools to your advantage. It’s like you’re filming a little movie! And you’re like the actor, the director, and the costume designer and you’re like doing it all. And I actually also feel like my drawing style is very naturally aligned with comics and graphic novels in a way. And so I really wanted to explore the medium and figure out how I wanted to tell the story.

Jocelyn Chung: Did you start at the beginning when you first began this project or did you start with a certain scene that was maybe out of chronological order? What was your creative process like?

Cindy Chang: There’s this image – it’s a flashback scene where it’s six months after the dad leaves and the character Cindy thinks that like her dad is coming home today and like her mom was like, “Oh…I don’t know if that’s really happening. Why don’t you give him a call?”

That was one of the scenes I drew for that prompt I was talking about. I drew that one and another, both flashback scenes. Those pretty much went straight into the book without edits. I started there, then went back and tried to do a whole outline.

In the beginning, I wanted to tell the story exactly as it was. When something is buried in you, there’s a feeling that it has to be true, exactly as it happened, so people understand. But my agent said, “Hmm…this isn’t really a story.” She was very honest, which I appreciated. I needed to figure out how to make it into something people would want to read. That was a challenge in itself, trying to figure it out and learning how to do it.

Jocelyn Chung: Within the creative process– now I hear that you had your agent as a guide and someone to bounce ideas off of. But what was the publishing process [like] overall? What did you first present in your book pitch? And how far off was that from the final? Did you already have it finished completely? Or did you just have a few spreads? And throughout the editing process, were there different obstacles or unexpected challenges that you faced in bringing this into a book format and not just telling your story as it is?

Cindy Chang: I feel like everyone has their own unique publishing story and no two stories are the same, but it’s all pretty opaque before you get into it. So for me, basically I started in 2019 and now it’s 2025. So it’s been some time.

I had these two sample drawings like scenes and I had put together a one pager of what this book was going to be about and some comp titles, and I think I had put together an outline before I submitted this work to an agent.

At the time, I was working through a lot of messy ideas. I had a couple of critique partners who I’m very grateful for because they saw the roughest version when I didn’t really know what I was doing. They were the first people I shared this idea with, and that was just immensely helpful to have their support. I had actually another group of folks who were encouraging me to query for an agent, even before I felt ready. I felt a lot of resistance, thinking, I have no idea what I’m doing! This is a vulnerable story, and I’m scared to send it to a dream agent or people in the industry!

So it took a little bit, but I’m really grateful to have had that push because I ended up getting an agent in about January of 2020 and then spent a lot of time working on revising and getting the story to a good place and working on more like sample chapters and sample art. And my agent is a literary agent, so she was really helpful in terms of actually crafting the story with me and guiding me through a lot of that. Previously I had been working on picture book art but I had to learn how to tell a story where memories had to be shaped into a narrative.

I sold the book in November 2020. Working with my agent was a dream—she always asked the right questions and gave insights that helped me refine the story. It took time. I finally turned in everything by summer 2023, then worked on coloring.

But in the beginning, I had so much to learn, because graphic novels are such a big endeavor. They’re like 270 pages! I actually went to a couple other talks before I started working on this book. There was one event that Raina Telgemeier was at and someone asked her a question like, “How do I get started?” And she was like, “Start small! Make a zine or like something,” and I just did the complete opposite where I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing! I’m just gonna make a whole book!”

I also got advice from other author/illustrators, who I’m so thankful for, who chatted with me in the beginning when I had no idea what I was doing, and through that learned what tools should I even use, like Clip Studio Paint, and I read a lot of books and listened to this podcast called Graphic Novel TK which was immensely helpful. I have a lot of resources I can share with you afterward! It was a lot of learning and a lot of time in the chair, doing the physical work of drawing and redrawing—so many times.

Jocelyn Chung: I feel like something that a lot of people who maybe aren’t in the publishing world don’t know is just how long publishing takes! Even hearing that you started this in 2019 and now this has just been released February 4th, 2025. Oh, that’s almost six years! And that’s not an uncommon story either! I also just love to hear when people have agents who are so aligned with the vision that can help pull out the right pieces of the story or the puzzle that need to be brought out to light. I also hear that you have a village of people who have encouraged you to take the necessary steps along the way whether it’s been, through conferences and learning I can tell that you’re a very inquisitive and like constantly-learning-type-of-person because of all the different places that you visited and conferences and stuff. But all of that informs you and your natural ability to story tell. But. I can imagine over the course of six years just [sharpening] your ability to hone in your own story.

Cindy Chang: Thank you. Looking back six years ago—wow, it was a lot. It also took a lot of support from different angles to make the book happen. The fun part of working with great partners is that everyone brings their own perspective, whether through a question or an idea.

In a way, it really takes a village to make a book. The author plays a big role, but so many other people contribute in ways that aren’t always visible but are critical to getting the book where it is. I’m really grateful for everyone who played a part.

Jocelyn Chung: Since this journey has been around six years for you. What have you realized, within yourself, has been like the biggest change from the Cindy who started the book to the Cindy who has now released this book out into the world?

Cindy Chang: Oh, that’s a good question. Let’s see. I don’t know quite how to answer that question.

I think when I first started I had a lot of energy and I was really determined and I think I look back and I’m like, wow, I had a lot of courage and a lot of drive.

And I think in the past few years, there’s been a lot of things that have changed. When I started working on this book, I had also started working as the first designer at the company I’m at now called Glean, and now the company’s also grown a lot. And I had a kid in the meantime as well! So it’s been a lot of change.

I think I’m just ultimately really happy with just how it turned out and being able to finally share it with people. I’ve been talking about 2025 for all these years as this far away date. I’m like, yeah, it’s coming. And every time someone’s oh, “How’s the book?” I’m like, “Yes! A few more years!” And so now I’m like, oh my gosh, it’s actually here. And so I’m just trying to savor that, and also try to work on whatever’s coming next as well.

Jocelyn Chung: I totally relate to that. That idea that people are asking like, “Oh, how is [the book] doing?” And you’re like, “Oh, much of the same! A few more years to go!”

The concept of timeline is so different. But yeah, it’s here! And I hope that you are able to fully soak in that you finally get to share this with the world. Especially because this was such a vulnerable piece of storytelling for you. I hope that within those 6 years, you have been able to just fully embrace and be able to be like, “Yeah, I want to share this story with the world” and I think there’s such a gift that readers will receive in the heart that you have behind wanting other readers, both young and old, to feel seen and understood in some of the hidden pains that we experienced. Especially in Asian American or Taiwanese American communities as well.

I guess you’re hinting a little bit about other projects down the road, but I’d love to know what projects you might be having coming out next? I know that this has been six years in the making and you finally have one out, but what can we look for next from you? And also, where can readers find and follow your work?

Cindy Chang: Yeah. So I am working on a second middle grade graphic novel. It’s in the beginning phases and it won’t be a follow up to this story, but it’ll be something separate. But yeah, I don’t have a timeline exactly on that, but hopefully it’ll take, shorter than six years to work on!

But yeah, I’m on Instagram most often @cindobindo or my website at cindychang.com. You can follow me there!

Jocelyn Chung: Can we know a little bit about what the next graphic novel will be about? If it’s not related. You can say as general as you want!

Cindy Chang: It’s fairly general right now, because I’m still trying to work out the outline and stuff like that, but I’m interested in exploring this idea about what success means and the fact that sometimes, what you think it means actually isn’t the thing that you’re chasing or that you really need. This concept of “never enough.”
So yeah, just another other light topic to explore! *laughs* I think it’s just more processing for me. That’s the loose idea I have right now, but it will firm up one of these days.

Jocelyn Chung: Oh, just light topics. Feeling never enough… changing your views of success…. It sounds like you are healing. People can’t see me through the recording, but I gripped my heart when she said that because, I felt that. But I’m so excited, first, I’m so excited to read this book. Mine is in the mail and hopefully coming tomorrow! But also I am really excited to just see what comes next from you. I think just hearing, again, the vulnerability of your storytelling and the thoughtfulness and the research that you put into it. There’s such a robust level of storytelling that you are giving through your graphic novels.

Just really happy for you and excited that this beautiful work will finally be out in the world and that people can find this book everywhere where books are sold. Is there a specific bookstore that you want to plug that you want people to specifically buy books from?

Cindy Chang: Yeah, my favorite local– well, I have a lot of favorite local indie bookstores– but I’m doing a book launch at the one closest to me called Linden Tree Books in Los Altos. They’re super cool.

And yeah, ultimately, I’m just really grateful and excited to be able to share this story. I hope that in doing so, my book creates some space to open up dialogue about stuff that we might not normally talk about in our day to day. And I hope to inspire kids to be vulnerable with people who are close to them and be able to speak their own truths and share their own stories as well.

Jocelyn Chung: That’s so beautiful. We are very lucky to have your storytelling in the world. And thanks so much for this thoughtful conversation and for just sharing a bit about your own story with all of us!

Cindy Chang: Thank you. It was such a pleasure chatting with you. So thank you again so much, Jocelyn!

Jocelyn Chung is a Taiwanese-American designer and writer who loves exploring the intersection of thoughtful storytelling and communication design. Chung is the author of When Love is More than Words, out now from Nancy Paulsen Books and The River of Care, forthcoming in Spring 2026. Read her recent feature on TaiwaneseAmerican.org here.

Jocelyn’s Website / Jocelyn’s Instagram