The novelist, Lisa Ko, debut her novel, The Leavers, in 2016. Ko has been making short stories since the age of 5 years old. She made all her characters white then she realized “why not make my characters look like me.” Lisa Ko grew up in a predominantly white area, additionally, in media representing only white folk, which honestly lead her to make a majority of her characters also white. For numerous of artists of color, they will naturally make the main protagonist white because the lack of strong representation of people of color in media. And of top of that, growing up in a middle-classed, suburban, primarily white area, therefore, 9/10 she was most likely the only brown kid in class. Ko has stated, “I was always really conscious of being different on the outside, but I think there was a way that I was able to use that to my advantage in terms of being creative and having fun with it,” Ko said. “It really formed a lot of my early identity and also who I wanted to write about and who I …show more content…
In The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord was the influential novel that would change Mrs. Ko’s life forever. The novel left her crying and chilled, so in ours terms, shook like she saw a ghost. She didn’t read another book by an Asian writer until college; after this she continued reading and supporting writers of color to read. These writers influenced her to write her award winning novel, The Leavers. Ko graduated college and moved to New York where she worked. She found her a “tribe of cooler weirdos”: the writers, activists, and artists. Ko then moved to San Francisco where she had for a film production company and aid an Asian-American magazine, then after five wild years in California, she resided back in the Big Apple on her thirtieth birthday. While all the craziness was going on, she was writing her novel we all know, The