Debut author Rin-rin Yu draws on personal experiences in her contemporary middle grade novel Goodbye, French Fry. Chinese American 10-year-old Ping-Ping wishes she was named Megan—maybe then her annoying classmate Lee would stop calling her “French Fry” due to the tofu sticks she eats at lunch. But Ping-Ping’s immigrant parents encourage her and her younger brother Xy to ignore bullies and embrace their heritage. Even more pressing for Ping-Ping than Lee’s harassment, however, is the possibility that the family could relocate to Kenya for Baba’s UN job. Yu spoke with PW about telling a different kind of immigration story and adjusting her writing style for fiction narratives.

On your website, you say that Goodbye, French Fry is based on your own childhood. How much of your lived experiences informed Ping-Ping’s character arc?

I did not take Taekwondo—my kids do—and I have an older sister, not a little brother. But all the characters in the book are based on real people and a lot of the exchanges really happened to me.

My sister is very much melded into Ping-Ping’s character, while Xy is based on my own son. I grew up in suburban New York. My dad worked for the United Nations. There really was a chance that he was going to be posted to a different office somewhere around the world, but I played that up a little more in the book. I don’t think my parents really let on as much about those kinds of things as Ping-Ping’s parents do in the book, though. And a bully really did randomly start calling me “French Fry.” The way we resolve it in the book is different to how I resolved it in real life, because the way I did it when I was a kid isn’t something I would want to advocate that children actually do. But otherwise, a lot of it is quite similar.

When my sister was reading the book, she was like, “Oh, I remember when that happened.” We’ll read reviews and she’ll say, “It’s weird, having people comment on my childhood.” She thinks it’s hilarious.

Why did you choose to write a fictionalized version of your youth rather than a memoir or other nonfiction work?

I first thought I would write a book about my parents’ childhoods, but it turns out that it’s really hard to do that when you didn’t live it. I didn’t grow up in that period. Even though I’ve visited Taiwan and China, I never lived there. I don’t know what it looked like when my parents were kids. I was also thinking that the market was a little bit flooded with these kinds of stories. I didn’t know how many people would want to read about the past. I was not convinced that my parents’ story would be interesting to anybody except me and some relatives.

I was like, “Well, what do I do now?” I remember going to the library with my kids. They would try to find books about Asian kids like them, and there weren’t that many. There were a lot more than when I was a kid, sure, but a lot of them were talking about kids who immigrated with their parents, who went through the cultural changes with them. But that was very different for me. My parents immigrated to the United States as students, and I know the stories of when they first came here, about them learning to be parents in a place where they had never observed what it was like to be a parent. There aren’t a lot of stories out there like that, but I know a lot of kids who grew up this way.

That’s when I started writing Goodbye, French Fry. I thought, “Why not just write it for kids like that, instead of as an adult looking back?”

How did your career in multimedia journalism influence your approach to writing fiction?

As soon as I knew how to write, I was always writing stories. I always knew I was going to be a writer, but it was hard to figure out how to make money as a writer. I took a journalism feature writing night class at NYU, to try it out, and I really enjoyed it, so I decided to apply to journalism school. I eventually found a job in magazines, and that sort of became the answer to what I was interested in doing, because it was a lot of feature writing, which involves a lot of creativity. I had time to really think about what kind of story I wanted to write.

But even when I started writing Goodbye, French Fry, I had to learn a lot. As a journalist, I get fixated on making sure everything is true and accurate, and I had to learn, when writing fiction, that it didn’t matter as much. It goes back to why I decided to write a fictionalized version of my childhood. There are a lot of things that just wouldn’t make sense if I was writing this as a memoir for children. It wouldn’t answer a lot of the questions they would have. “Well, why did the bully call you French Fry?” I have no idea why this kid called me that. But, in a fictionalized version of that experience, I could make up a reason that would probably better satisfy the child who’s reading it.

How has your debut experience been so far?

I didn’t know what to expect but it’s been an adventure. Book publishing is a wholly different beast than magazine publishing. I know exactly how that works, so everything about this experience has been so eye-opening and humbling, but also just a lot of fun. Like, there are book influencers! There are people already out there reading my book and pinging me about it.

What are you working on next?

I’ve been working on some things in my head. I want to continue in this genre, I want to continue telling ordinary stories that a lot of kids can relate to. I would love to write a story that’s focused on a boy main character—maybe even a continuation of Goodbye, French Fry, where Ping-Ping is a bit older.

Goodbye, French Fry by Rin-rin Yu. Penguin/Paulsen, $17.99 Feb. ISBN 978-0-593-85808-0