Getting Behind the Wheel
A chat with poet Janet Wong
By Sylvia Wong

Children’s poet Janet Wong was born and raised Los Angeles. She is a graduate of both UCLA, where she founded the UCLA Immigrant Children’s Art Project, and Yale Law School. Since embarking on a writing career, Wong has won numerous awards including the International Reading Association’s “Celebrate Literacy Award,” and the Stone Center Recognition of Merit. In an interview with AsianWeek, she discussed her new book, Behind the Wheel.

Q: Have you always enjoyed writing poetry?

A: No. I hated poetry, starting about 4th grade. In fairness to poets, I have to say that what I hated was not poetry itself, most likely, but rather the act of memorizing a poem, only to forget it while standing in front of the whole class. And the poems I hated were the ones written by dead English poets. I couldn’t see how they connected to my life. When I heard Myra Cohn Livingston read her poems, and then when I read the great American children’s poets -- David McCord, Arnold Adoff, John Ciardi, Lilian Moore, Valerie Worth -- that’s when I changed my mind. Now poetry makes up most of my reading and writing.

Q:What inspired you to write this book?

A: After writing The Rainbow Hand: Poems about Mothers and Children, I wanted to write a collection honoring my father. I thought hard about the things we did when I was growing up, and one very special memory involved driving, riding on long trips, hearing him tell his story about joy rides with his buddy Shin. So I wrote the poem “Daddy and Shin,” and then “Hitchhiker” and “Hitchhiker 2,” all poems about my father -- and driving.

At that point I decided that a driving collection would be fun to write and probably fun to read, too, especially for a teen audience. When I was a freshman at UCLA, I volunteered for Prison Coalition, and week after week I went into a juvenile detention center to read to kids. What did they want to read? The driver’s handbook. Last week that experience came back to me in a good way, as I visited a juvenile detention center in Kansas, reading from Behind the Wheel.

Q: Why did you use driving?

A: I grew up in Los Angeles., where it’s hard to live without a car and where people drive all the time. So the idea of driving as a metaphor for life is somewhat natural to me, given the context of my childhood.

Q: Behind the Wheel addresses themes about racial identity...

A: I’d like to think that the whole book works against the stereotypes of the woman driver and the Asian driver. I have heard too many white friends joke, ‘Asian driver!’ when some slowpoke bozo cuts in front of us on the freeway. And I would look, and indeed the driver would be Asian.

“Daddy and Shin” also works against the stereotype of an Asian male as meek and mild; those guys were adventurous, fun, daring.

Q: You have a very strong character in your book. For example, in your poem “The Hitchhiker,” I love the line, “I look into his pimple face as cold and hard as I can look, looking not at all like my father’s daughter.” Can you describe the strength of this character?

A: Actually, as I note in “Hitchhiker 2,” I think my father’s generosity reveals a stronger character than mine. I am too often a skeptic, a doubter. My dad has faith in people, hope for the best. With all that faith and hope, though, one can be tricked, and let down, disappointed. So if the daughter described in “Hitchhiker” is strong, it is only because the world, sadly, is full of so many things gone wrong.

Q: What message do you hope to get out to the public?

A: I would love readers to see, as they have with the Harry Potter books, that the best children’s literature is for everyone, from 5-year-olds to 90-year-olds. And I am enormously gratified to see that my books are connecting with readers of every ethnicity and background. A fourth-grader once said to me, “Your Chinese grandmother is just like my Norwegian grandmother!”

Q: What would you hope to see more of in Asian American literature?

A: I would like to see more mainstreaming of Asian American authors, articles about us as authors rather than ethnic authors. This is happening for me already, and it gives me a great opportunity to connect with readers of all backgrounds.