Read a Q&A with Rebecca Lim | Tiger Daughter

Rebecca Lim is an Australian writer, illustrator and editor and the author of over twenty books, including The Astrologer’s Daughter (A CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers) and the bestselling Mercy. Her work has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards, shortlisted multiple times for the Aurealis Awards and Davitt Awards, and longlisted for the Gold Inky Award and the David Gemmell Legend Award. Her novels have been translated into German, French, Turkish, Portuguese, Polish and Russian. She is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative.

Today, Rebecca Lim is on the blog to answer a few of our questions about her new children’s book, Tiger Daughter. Read on …

Rebecca Lim (Photograph by Eugenia Lim)

Please tell us about your book, Tiger Daughter!

RL: Tiger Daughter is both a clear-eyed, warts-and-all love letter to the first generation migrant experience, and a critique of entrenched cultural traditions that are long overdue for re-examination and discussion, particularly for women and girls.

What was the inspiration behind this novel?

RL: A parent-teacher interview for my Year 7 daughter which drove home to me how much the Australian literary ‘canon’ for children had not moved in over 30 years. Authentic #OwnVoices migrant stories are still largely missing from published Australian fiction for children, and Tiger Daughter was a very visceral response to the gap between what was being recommended for my daughter to read and the actual student demographic at my daughter’s school (predominantly Asian and South-Asian first gen or second gen kids).

Where did your protagonist, Wen, come from and what do you love about her?

RL: Wen Zhou isn’t quite ‘straight off the boat’ because she’s been in Australia for a few years by the start of the novel, but she’s part of a very strict, very traditional, one-child family from China that speaks Mandarin in the home. What I love about her is that even though she’s got almost zero agency and control over the conditions of her life at home, she’s a fighter and a questioner. She’s a quiet superhero with extraordinary powers of empathy and kindness; things we need more of in this world. Her deliberate actions and choices ripple outward into other lives, changing them irrevocably.

You’re a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative. Can you tell us a little bit about it and why it’s so important to you?

RL: Voices is just a tiny, voluntary initiative that my friend, Ambelin Kwaymullina (acclaimed First Nations author and academic) and I run from our studies on opposite sides of the country. We essentially (heavily) lean on our friends and contacts in the Australian publishing industry to stump up to pitch days or to help us get the work of emerging, #OwnVoices writers and illustrators who are First Nations, People of Colour, LGBTIQ+ and/or living with disability in front of publishers of all sizes. We were really proud to co-edit Meet Me at the Intersection (Fremantle Press, 2018), which showcased predominantly emerging author YA memoir, fiction and poetry. We’re hoping to work out a mentorship scheme with Allen & Unwin later this year or next year, which will see Ambelin and me mentoring up to four emerging authors with picture book, middle grade or young adult works-in-progress with a view to putting those works in front of Allen & Unwin at the end of the mentorship process. COVID-19 derailed our original timing, so watch this space.

What do you love so much about writing for children?

RL: Connecting with kids across the full spectrum of humanity. I just get a lot of joy and energy out of writing for, and interacting with, kids who love reading, writing or creating stories (regardless of the medium). It’s such a formative, important time in anyone’s life that I’m keen for younger readers to not feel like I did — that something was missing in the stories, or in themselves, because published stories don’t reflect their lived experiences. Writing for children keeps me in touch with my children, too, and what they are reading and thinking about. And with ‘child-me’ as well.

What’s the last book you read and loved?

RL: Can I rattle off a whole bunch? The Three-Body Problem sci fi trilogy by Liu Cixin, Ambelin’s incredible Living on Stolen Land, Ellen Van Neerven’s most recent poetry collection Throat, Eliza Henry-Jones’ How to Grow a Family Tree, Rawa Arja’s The F Team, Cath Moore’s Metal Fish, Falling Snow and Garth Nix’s The Left-Handed Booksellers of London. Every single one of them transported me out of the bodily and mental constraints of being stuck in lockdown in Melbourne for over 7 months.

What do you hope readers will discover in Tiger Daughter?

RL: Reserves of empathy, understanding and kindness in themselves for others who are ‘different’. Humans are really good at demonising ‘the other’, or people or things that they don’t understand when, really, we’re all just humans underneath trying to get by and make a life; feel joy or safety or belonging.

And finally, what’s up next for you?

RL: I’m part of the MIRROR Mentorship program selection panel this year (offered in partnership between Think+DO Tank Foundation and the publishing imprint Scribble) which is seeking to identify, support, mentor and develop writers, illustrators and literary translators with the aim of making new Australian children’s literature that reflects an increasingly diverse and curious reading public.

I’m also splitting my time between writing the next book in The Children of the Dragon series, the next book in the Mercy series and working on this completely amorphous adult crime novel that may or may not have legs. One of them, gladiator-fashion, will vanquish the others for my attention.

Thanks Rebecca!

—Tiger Daughter by Rebecca Lim (Allen & Unwin) is out now.

Tiger Daughter

by Rebecca Lim

Wen Zhou is the daughter and only child of Chinese immigrants whose move to the lucky country has proven to be not so lucky.

Wen and her friend, Henry Xiao - whose mum and dad are also struggling immigrants - both dream of escape from their unhappy circumstances, and form a plan to sit an entrance exam to a selective high school far from home. But when tragedy strikes, it will take all of Wen's resilience and resourcefulness to get herself and Henry through the storm that follows...

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