The author's honest, poignant and tear-jerking text earned her the Newbury Honor, given to a select number of standout titles each year.

“I think I say in my author's note that it's the hard ones, the difficult stories, those difficult memories that can really sort of bring you to a place of healing,” she said in the podcast interview. Wang said she envisions the book as a catalyst for conversation. And why was my family so different? Why didn't we belong? So, I wanted to write about those just to process it for myself,' recalled Wang. And I just remember all these feelings of shame and embarrassment. When they saw it growing wild “…they were thrilled, and I was very much not thrilled. “It's semi-autobiographical, and it recounts a memory that I have that has haunted me for a long time of picking watercress by the side of the road in rural Ohio where I grew up,” Wang said on our Why We Write podcast in September.Īlthough readily available in China, her parents were unable to find it in stores at the time. The latter was particularly meaningful to the author, who based the book on her experiences growing up Asian American in the Midwest in the 1970s. It was selected for a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor and Wang and Chin received the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. A favorite of critics, it received starred reviews from Horn Book, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and the School Library Journal. 'Watercress' has had a really good year since its March 2021 publication.

Watercress by Andrea Wang