Author Julie Leung’s 2023 picture book The Truth About Dragons, illustrated by Hanna Cha, earned a Caldecott Honor and an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the Picture Book category. Author-illustrator Angie Kang received a 2026 Caldecott Honor for her picture book Our Lake. In addition, she is art director at the Vestal Review literary magazine, and her art has been featured in the New Yorker. Together, Kang and Leung have created Navigating Night, a picture book tracing a father-daughter duo during an evening of making deliveries—a story that is partly inspired by Leung’s own experiences. Here, the collaborators discuss the complexities of connecting with parents, the book’s art direction, and how the story acts as a love letter to the author’s childhood.
Angie Kang: Yesterday, I came across this poem that reminded me of you. It’s by Natasha Rao and it begins with these two lines: “I’m only kind to my father / in poems he will never read.” It made me think about how you said this book feels like an apology for things you weren’t able to say to your own parents.
Julie Leung: We’re starting off heavy, Angie.
Kang: I know. I’m sorry.
Leung: Lucky, this is one of my favorite subjects. Even though I am fluent to an extent in Cantonese, I wouldn’t know how to translate to my parents the kind of bittersweet feeling of growing up the way I did. But I am able to distill that complexity instead into a picture book. You know, figuring out how to connect with one’s parents is not that unlike trying to figure out your way in the dark, like in our book.
Kang: Yes! And I love how while the daughter guides the father through the night, the father is the one who reorients her world when he shares his story. He offers a means to reframe her duties and gain an appreciation for this different type of childhood—especially with the line: “Before I had you, I would get so lost.”
Leung: You know that line is a real line that my dad has said to me.
Kang: Really!
Leung: Yeah! Memory being what it is, I cannot recall what the conversation before or after it was, but it absolutely is something that is stuck in my mind. Love manifests in different ways, but it’s also a shared burden. I had a large responsibility as the only child of two people who had dreamed of coming to this country, a big gamble. I think that line always illuminated the interdependency between me and my parents.
Kang: I loved how you used the word illuminated.
Leung: That was hilariously unintentional. What I also loved is these panels of quiet that you added after that line. I didn’t write it in. What inspired you to add that moment?
Kang: That moment bowled me over when I first read it. As the father says that line, I wanted to zoom in on their faces—it’s the closest, emotionally and literally, that we get to the characters in the whole book. But after the page turn, I wanted to draw back so we see them through the windshield, to give them privacy and silence to process such an intense moment of connection. I felt that the words were so powerful they needed space.
Leung: It’s definitely supposed to be the emotional core of the piece and you absolutely recognized it. It kind of hits like a bombshell. It is both a resolution and not a resolution. There’s not necessarily a happy ending where everyone feels great, just a form of acceptance.
Kang: I appreciate how you left space for the complicated emotions to sit together. In the two silent panels you mentioned, I also painted a moon emerging from the clouds to reflect this sense of coming to an understanding but not necessarily finding a solution. The moon offers only a glimmer of light, but enough to keep them moving and help them find their way home. Because there’s never a verbal resolution, I wanted an external means to show this internal moment of change—hence the light after the storm.
Leung: Thinking about the conceit of a storm, can I ask about the way that you considered the element of water?
Kang: When reading the manuscript, I was really taken by the scene where the main character peeks into different homes and sees how cozy these families seem. I thought that rain could push that sense of discomfort of being outside when you long to be inside. As I started illustrating, I realized it could become a symbolic device as well. It’s stormy when the girl is frustrated, then clears up during her conversations with her father. And of course, the rain completely dissipates by the end.
Leung: I’ll admit that I love walking along New York streets sometimes, just peering into other people’s lives—not in a creepy way, just in a wistful, poetic way.
Kang: Me too! And speaking of looking in, originally in my sketches, the last spread of the family eating together was set inside the restaurant. But Anne and Sarah [editor Anne Schwartz and art director Sarah Hokanson] noted that we should see them from outside, so that it mirrors this moment when she’s looking into the windows earlier. That was it! And I feel like you planted the seeds for that parallel. I love how the restaurant is the space where her family gathers.
Leung: When I was writing those lines, I was capturing the typical family unit and what they do at dinnertime in contrast to folks in the service industry at that same moment. We’re creating the meals, delivering the meals, and waiting to eat ourselves.
Kang: Wow.
Leung: I wanted to bring visibility to that invisible layer of human effort. Growing up, I felt like there was this “normal” part of the world and then there was the life that we were living. I loved that there’s a certain acceptance of that life at the end. It’s like you are kind of walking into the window of your own scene. A scene of your own meal being cooked by your loved ones, even though it may look very different than “normal.”
Kang: Your speaking of visibility reminds me of that line in the movie Ladybird where attention is positioned as love, even around something that you might have complicated feelings about. This book feels like a love letter to your childhood and parents because you’ve paid so much attention to and remember not only your bittersweet memories, but your parents’ stories as well.
Leung: I wrote this book knowing that there are kids today not living the lives that they want because of their circumstances. There’s always this longing and wishing you had what others had. And my hope is that they may read this book and see that whatever painful differences you feel today, these struggles will make you a stronger person on the other side.
Navigating Night by Julie Leung, illus. by Angie Kang. Random House/Schwartz, $18.99 Mar. 10 ISBN 978-0-593-89769-0
