GIP Event: Vanessa Hua
This past week, Poly had the pleasure of hosting Vanessa Hua for a GIP event. Ms. Hua is an author and journalist who has recently released her debut novel, A River of Stars.
The main idea of Ms. Hua's talk was writing as a way to tell your own story. She found, growing up, that the books she loved and thought were legitimate literature were composed of entirely white characters, and when she began to write herself, she wrote white characters as well. However, as she got older she realized the power in writing characters more similar to herself. To me, this story is very similar to the one Reyna Grande, another author who came to speak at a GIP event recently. Ms. Grande spoke in detail about
One thing that really jumped out at me from Ms. Hua's presentation was her description of the initial setting of her book, A River of Stars. The main character, Scarlett, is a Chinese woman in the United States to live at a maternity home in Southern Califonia, which is a place where women can pay to live near the end of their pregnancies so that their children will be born here and therefore have U.S. citizenship. Just hearing about this inspired me greatly. Taylor and I have been working on a project through the Global Scholars program to provide citizenship classes at a non-profit nearby. Ms. Hua's talk reaffirmed my passion for this project by showing the great lengths to which a person will go for citizenship and its importance.
Thank you to Ms. Hua, and the Global Scholars and teachers who made the event happen!
The main idea of Ms. Hua's talk was writing as a way to tell your own story. She found, growing up, that the books she loved and thought were legitimate literature were composed of entirely white characters, and when she began to write herself, she wrote white characters as well. However, as she got older she realized the power in writing characters more similar to herself. To me, this story is very similar to the one Reyna Grande, another author who came to speak at a GIP event recently. Ms. Grande spoke in detail about
One thing that really jumped out at me from Ms. Hua's presentation was her description of the initial setting of her book, A River of Stars. The main character, Scarlett, is a Chinese woman in the United States to live at a maternity home in Southern Califonia, which is a place where women can pay to live near the end of their pregnancies so that their children will be born here and therefore have U.S. citizenship. Just hearing about this inspired me greatly. Taylor and I have been working on a project through the Global Scholars program to provide citizenship classes at a non-profit nearby. Ms. Hua's talk reaffirmed my passion for this project by showing the great lengths to which a person will go for citizenship and its importance.
Thank you to Ms. Hua, and the Global Scholars and teachers who made the event happen!
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