SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A little boy goes on a hero's quest to discover the truth about dragons. That's also the title of Julie Leung's children's book. You must put your favorite cloak around your shoulders and your sturdiest boots upon your feet, she writes; leave on a day when the air as crisp as new paper, the wind is gentle and the skies are clear.
JULIE LEUNG: The quest narrative leads the main character to kind of a swamp witch's home in the middle of a forest, and there's this grandmotherly figure who gives him food who then tells him the truth about dragons - what they're really like.
SIMON: She tells him that dragons...
(Reading) ...Are fearsome and fire-breathing, my child, with wings like a bat's and the body of a lizard. Piercing horns grace their reptilian heads.
LEUNG: This particular grandmother kind of gives our main character a very Westernized description of how dragons are fearsome creatures. They reside in caves. They hoard treasure. And then, midway through the book, their narration kind of changes.
SIMON: Because the truth about dragons is there is more than one truth. So join us now on our own hero's journey, into the forest and through the groves, for our series of conversations between authors and illustrators, Picture This, where, yes, dragons are real.
LEUNG: So we open on a mother telling a bedtime story to our protagonist child, who I've nicknamed bao bei, which is just, like, a little nickname common in Chinese culture for little kids. So the mother is telling the story about how bao bei needs to find an answer to a really incredible secret.
HANNA CHA: Hello. My name is Hanna Cha. I illustrated "Truth About Dragons," and I'm also Korean American. I am a huge mixed-media type of person. For the sketches, in order to have that energy and spontaneous feeling, I'll draw it on paper. I scan it in. I draw it digitally, I print it out. I draw it on top, and that's how I kind of get the dynamic sketches all down.
LEUNG: I remember when I first saw the sketches. The first word is, like, just the enrichment. There's so many things to catch the eyes and study with each of the spreads.
CHA: From Julie's text, that is just a springboard. She writes that the house smells like cedar chests, sugar cookies and apple cider, a drink she will spoon for you from a cauldron. So from the sentence, I think of all the components and ingredients that would happen in this house. And then I was thinking, well, that means she'll probably have a lot of, like, herbs, and there would be this dry scent, and then I'm like, what furniture would they use? I just keep on adding on to it until I can't have anymore, and then I just - I believe there's just some kind of integrity through materials that translates just automatically, so I decided to use pen nibs for the first half of the book, and I got inspired by a lot of the older folk tales and storybooks, and I loved how, in those books, they use borders to create a separate layer that adds to the story. That just worked so perfectly for the first half.
LEUNG: And then, midway through the book, the narration kind of changes, and this is one of my favorite, favorite spreads that Hanna has done. The narrator basically says, you may go on another quest, and the character kind of steps out of this beautiful, ornate framework that Hanna has been doing for the first half of the book into, like, a completely different art style. And the second part of the quest is essentially an echo of the first, but instead of a oak forest, we're entering a bamboo forest.
CHA: The spread that Julie says that she loves is also my favorite, but it was also a spread that took so long to get to. It was like, how do I transition from the borders and this material to this very airy - for the second half, I use sumi ink and calligraphy brushes. These brushes are Minhwa brushes from Korean folk art. For me, I'm more comfortable doing brushes. That has been most of my work beforehand. The second half kind of came very naturally after that.
LEUNG: You end up at a airy cottage in the mountains. That's where another grandmother figure will be waiting to give you a different type of truth about a dragon, which mirrors the more East Asian description - that they are made out of fire and air. They are essentially godlike beings that control the rain and the rivers. And then, at the very end, you realize that the mother has been telling a story of the two grandmothers, who have very distinct cultural heritages to pass down to him.
The book was inspired by my firstborn son. We had debated a lot about which last name to give him, my husband having a very common, Americanized name that's synonymous with a soup company and me having one that's always been traditionally a little harder to pronounce. And all along, I've been grappling with, how do I retain aspects of my Chinese heritage? - the concern that throughout the course of my child's life, he may be forced or feel like he needs to pick one culture or the other. And I always loved folklore. I always loved fantasy creatures, particularly dragons, and so the idea came to my head. It's like, there's such different interpretations of the dragon mythology between Eastern and Western cultures, and it's a perfect metaphor of how my kids have to kind of grapple with this idea that there are two truths to a certain single myth.
CHA: I also, like Julie, love fantasy. I only got to live in Korea for five years when I was younger, around third grade to middle school, and that's when I was first exposed to this benevolent, godlike dragon that I'd never conceptualized before. That's when I did a lot of dive into mythologies. In Korea, there's not too much talk about dragons, but often, it is connected to the king. I remember just seeing, like, how, like, there's this sense of benevolence, and, like, the gold trims around the scales, and I think I even unconsciously tried to add that to this dragon, this imagery of awe when I first saw it as a child.
LEUNG: I think a lot about the ways that we describe mixed or blended or half. Like, there's a lot of terminology that we use when we talk about kids who are coming from different cultural and racial backgrounds, and I want the idea of my kid's future feeling like it is doubled; it is enriched; it is limitless. I would never want my kid to feel like he only has partial access to a certain type of his identity because he is only half. There is no half measure to identity.
CHA: I need to say, when I first got hold of your manuscript, I actually cried, because it really sung to, like, that inner child, where as a Korean American, my mom and dad immigrated here, and then I was born, so second gen. This is probably what they thought when they had me in America, this in-between child, but with so much love and trying to just help her go through this journey.
LEUNG: This was very much like delving into my own realm of experience, and the fact that this partnership just happened to be so, I don't know, fate-bound (laughter), in a lot of interesting ways - I just don't know that I can top this for my second born. I think about it sometimes. I'm like, I don't know that I've got another book in me.
(LAUGHTER)
LEUNG: The love and care placed into "The Truth About Dragons" - I don't know that it's a replicable experience (laughter).
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SIMON: That was author Julie Leung and illustrator Hanna Cha, talking about their Caldecott Honor book, "The Truth About Dragons." Our series, Picture This, is produced by Samantha Balaban and edited by Melissa Gray, and you can find the full list of Picture This stories at npr.org/picturethis.
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