Stacey Lee is the author of YA historical fiction including The Downstairs Girl, Luck of the Titanic, and Outrun the Moon, winner of the Asian Pacific Award for Literature. Her forthcoming novel, Heiress of Nowhere, is out March 17 from Sarah Barley Books. A native of southern California and fourth-generation Chinese American, she is a co-founder of We Need Diverse Books. Ahead of the nation’s semiquincentennial, Lee reflects on our complicated history, and how books have always offered her a sense of belonging.
I was five years old when the United States celebrated its bicentennial. Herbert Hoover Elementary marked the occasion with an all-school pageant held out on the playing field. There were pioneers and gold rushers, tricorn hats (which I understood only as “pointy and itchy”), kids dressed as the Statue of Liberty, the original colonies, covered wagons, and—most enviable of all—a group of children packed onto a cardboard train. At five, you don’t remember facts so much as feelings, and my dominant feeling was that something important was happening and I did not fully understand it. Also, I desperately wanted to be on that train.
Instead, I was standing on the field wearing a tricorn hat I had never requested, singing “You’re a Grand Old Flag” until we were red, white, and blue in the face.
It was 1976. Nadia Comăneci scored a perfect 10 at the Olympics. Apple and Microsoft were founded. The Vietnam War had ended not long before, and the country was trying—awkwardly, earnestly—to feel hopeful again. At least, that’s how it looks in retrospect. At the time, I just knew there were costumes, flags, and a lot of standing around.
Somewhere in the middle of this celebration, my mother decided that my sisters and I should wear cheongsams—traditional Chinese dresses she’d sewed herself out of bright satin. Her reasoning was simple and, in hindsight, deeply political: Chinese people were here during the Gold Rush. We helped build the transcontinental railroad. We were part of this country’s history, too.
This logic did not persuade me. We were one of two Chinese families in the entire school. I was already acutely aware of my differences—pointed out in excruciating detail by classmates who found my lunchboxes endlessly fascinating and mildly horrifying. I did not want to wear a purple-pink-white satin dress that would invite even more attention. I did not want to be loud. I did not want to make a statement. It wasn’t my style. I would, in fact, rather have died.
But children do not get veto power over symbolic gestures, so I wore the dress and endured the teasing that followed. This had nothing to do with shame about being Chinese and everything to do with survival. At five, blending in felt like the highest possible achievement.
What was my style—even then—was hiding in the reading corner. Every kindergarten classroom had zones: blocks, dress-up, coloring tables. My favorite was the reading nook: a rug, a few tiny chairs, and a shelf of books. I loved Green Eggs and Ham. I had The Giving Tree memorized. Didn’t every kid love stories? Maybe. But I loved them because they let me slip out of discomfort and into somewhere quieter and kinder. Books didn’t ask me to explain myself. They didn’t stare. They just opened.
If you had asked five-year-old me whether she would someday write books, or speak publicly, or have opinions anyone else might want to hear, I would have assumed you were confusing me with a much louder child. And yet, even then, I knew—secretly, stubbornly—that stories were what I wanted.
I’ve now lived through roughly the last fifth of this country’s existence. That’s a strange thing to realize. That’s long enough to see stories change—long enough to see who gets included, who gets erased, and how often we pretend history is settled when it is anything but.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that a well-educated and enlightened society depends on books—not just as repositories of facts, but as spaces where we practice empathy, curiosity, and imagination. Books teach us that belonging is not a fixed condition handed down by pageants or anniversaries. It’s something we argue over, revise, and—if we’re lucky—expand.
My mother believed we belonged, even when I didn’t feel ready to stand out. She understood something I would only come to appreciate much later: that history is not just what’s celebrated on a field with cardboard trains and tricorn hats. It’s also the quiet insistence of showing up, telling stories, and refusing to disappear.
I still wouldn’t wear that cheongsam today. But I’ll happily stand here on America’s 250th birthday, books in hand, and say this: our country has always been shaped by many voices, many histories, and many ways of belonging—by people who loved the trifold hat, and people who very much did not. The story of us is still unfolding. What we choose to put on the page matters.
