To bring this story to life for four-to-eight year olds, author Julie Leung draws on her childhood memories of making food deliveries with her dad in the 1990s, offering a complex tapestry of the emotions children of immigrants experience. These children serve double roles. "Our parents made the sacrifice of leaving their homelands to ensure better futures for us," she writes in her Author's Note. "We are the reason they left. At the same time, in order to survive in this new world, we must, at an early age, become our parents' translators, advocates, and navigators."
She honors this unique bond by portraying a single night in the life of one father-daughter pair. As a young girl helps her father navigate streets to deliver Chinese take-out food, they navigate life in a new culture as well. Baba drives while his daughter looks at her notebook of addresses and a map where roads "sprawl before me like a spiderweb." She calls out turns to her dad and, in occasional glances out the window, she sees other children: finishing their homework in front of the TV, sitting down for dinner with their family. Her desire to be just a "normal" kid keeps growing. She tells her dad she doesn't want to do deliveries any more and that "other kids don't have to do this."
Instead of reacting, her father patiently asks for the next address and then starts telling his story of living in a country with "years of empty stomachs and worried whispers" and how he was chosen from his family to go live in far-away New York City with an uncle who could invite only one relative to join him. As understanding begins to dawn on the girl about the intense circumstances he has faced, her father tells her, "Before I had you, I would get so lost."
Illustrator Angie Kang, a 2024 Ezra Jack Keats Fellow, renders expressive illustrations in gouache, crayon, colored pencil, and pastel. She set the story on a rainy night "to both intensify the main character's discomfort with being outside and to reflect its emotional arc: It rains heavily while the girl is unhappy, but then relents after Baba opens up about his past. When the two finally reach an understanding, the clouds part to reveal the moon — a new light to guide them onward."
For its tenderness, sheer beauty, and expression of how warm-hearted communication can turn around a challenging situation, we consider this a stand-out book. Add to that its ability to help us understand others' experience and to have compassion for our own shifts of feeling, and it becomes even more special.
