There’s a brief mention of the pandemic in Throwback, my latest YA novel, about a Korean American girl who travels back to 1995 and meets her mother as a teen. It’s handled with an almost perceptively self-conscious breeziness — making a joke out of my protagonist’s anxiety spiral as she wonders why she was sent back in time. Was it to help her mom become homecoming queen or to save the world from the global pandemic?

I knew I had to address COVID-19 in the book, but I set the story in 2025 so that it would, hopefully, take place in a less pandemic-centered time. My teenage protagonist could worry about boyfriends and homecoming dances without a sense of existential doom hanging over it all. But it’s impossible for me to disentangle the process of writing Throwback from the experiences of 2020.

That previous summer, I had been in a sushi restaurant with my husband, celebrating our wedding anniversary and brainstorming ideas for my next book. (Yes, this is what happens when two storytellers are married.) The idea came to me: what if a girl traveled back in time to go to high school with her mom? Like Back to the Future, but Asian and nineties. Two of my YA novels have father-daughter relationships as the anchors, but a mother-daughter story was a whole other can of worms. Mother-daughters are Grey Gardens and Lady Bird and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Complicated stuff that, once excavated, unearths yet more complicated stuff.

But this story idea overrode my fear of the complicated. It came to me almost fully formed — as naturally as Marty McFly riding a hoverboard. We meet Samantha, a sharp and deeply feeling second-generation teen who doesn’t get along with her mom, ­Priscilla, a first-generation suburban striver with a kitchen straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie. After a huge fight, Sam calls a ride share to school, and it drops her off in 1995. She’s now going to school with her teenage mom.

I started a draft and turned it in to my agent in the fall. I felt good about it — this was a book about moms, and empathy, and the multitudes of the American dream, told through the entertaining package of time travel. A tall order of empathy felt necessary after the 2016 election, with so many of us still reeling from having an actual rotting turnip pile as our president. My agent gave me notes for revision, which I was ready to tackle with gusto. A few weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, I took a pregnancy test. I’d been trying to get pregnant for two years; taking the test was, by then, a monthly chore. But this time it came back positive. I ended the year with both excited terror and overwhelming optimism crowding my body.

Immediately, pregnancy fatigue and brain fog hit me like a freight train. My first trimester was spent napping, wanting to throw up when I wasn’t eating, and wanting to throw up even more when I was. The revision had to wait. And then it was March 2020, and I received worrisome results from a blood test. I had an amniocentesis scheduled for March 12, just a couple of days before everything in Los Angeles shut down with news of the virus being everywhere. I remember the pandemic feeling like this weird, abstract, looming thing I couldn’t deal with until the immediate looming thing was dealt with first. At the hospital, a woman reared back from me in the elevator. Looking back, I was a visibly pregnant Korean American woman, and it was probably out of fear of the “China flu.” But I didn’t even notice at the time. My husband pointed it out to me later, fuming.

With the pandemic wreaking havoc on our healthcare system, my test results took weeks. When I finally learned my baby was in the clear, the relief almost had me levitating. I was free to plan for a baby again without fear! Everything else was batshit and precarious — but this thing, this one thing was true.

It was while preparing for the biggest change of my life, and well into 2020, that I tried to finish revising Throwback. But every time I sat down to work, I would stare blankly at my computer. I would instead eat more stone fruit, play more Animal Crossing, and take another walk with my husband. Like everyone else, I was taking in news constantly via social media. As our government failed us, as police brutality had us marching in the streets, as elderly Asians were attacked in broad daylight — I felt this unease trickle through me. Something was off with the story. Writing a book about the American dream suddenly felt embarrassingly naive.

It was during this time that I read Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong, and, oh wow, did I feel my entire Asian American experience pulled apart and duly reckoned with…in the best way possible. I felt lit up from the inside, like I was being seen in a way that I had never been before. The book is a memoir, an introspective look into the history of Asian American immigrant experiences, and a bit of a call to arms. Hong tackles so much in a slim volume, but one line that stood out to me, which felt like a punch into my solar plexus, is what became the epigraph for Throwback: “If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering…I accept the burden of history is solely on my shoulders.” Reading Minor Feelings led me to interrogate what I was trying to do with my book. But I still couldn’t bring myself to work on it.

Eight months into my pregnancy, I called my agent and told her (tearfully) that I wasn’t going to get the manuscript revised before I had the baby. My agent, a mother of two living in Brooklyn, was beyond sympathetic. She told me that I needed to focus on having a healthy baby during this absolute horror of a time in history. I let Throwback go, and come August, had a baby boy.

The newborn months were hard. He didn’t sleep (who told me that newborns slept?!), I didn’t sleep, and breastfeeding was a hell cycle that threw me into postpartum depression. I felt like I was living someone else’s life while the real me watched sympathetically from afar. It was only after my son started sleeping and I stopped breastfeeding that I felt somewhat human again. And that I started yearning to write. Finally, I was ready for Throwback. And I knew, after everything that I had been through, that this story would need to change.

The format and the concept stayed the same. Entire chapters stayed exactly the same. But the thematic elements I had touched on in the first draft? I needed to dig in a little deeper.

Throwback is about three generations of Korean American women. There was no way I could keep flinching from the realities of being American in the modern world. I wanted to explore how the country Sam grows up in has changed since her grandmother immigrated. And how her grandmother’s hopes and dreams trickled down to Priscilla, and then to Sam. And how, as immigrant kids, we are forever grateful for the sacrifices of our parents before us—but we are still allowed, and perhaps privileged, to scrutinize this country that is our home. Is our legacy actually to do the work to make this country better? This country that our families suffered to reach and survive in, to have their children thrive in? They didn’t come here for us to be forever indebted to a Norman Rockwell American fantasy. They came here so that we, too, could feel ownership over our home. And that means we can be heartbroken by it, angry with it, and ultimately, responsible for it.

I look at my now-toddler son, who is half Korean, and wonder what his relationship to Korea will be. My mom, who spent almost every single day of his first three months helping to take care of him, speaks to him in Korean. She made him wear quilted onesies and fleece socks in eighty-degree weather. But what kind of real connection will he have to my mom’s steadfast Korean traditions? I feel like I am a facsimile of my mom’s Korean experience, and he will be a facsimile of a facsimile. But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s not a facsimile — it’s something new, with the blueprints of what came before as its foundation. We’re building layers on something that, in the end, becomes bigger than what came before.

There’s actually a second mention of the pandemic in Throwback. Sam says that her introverted brother thrived during lockdown. It’s a joke — to highlight the difference between her brother and herself. But some people do thrive during adversity. I don’t know if I thrived during that first pandemic year. But I managed to create two beautiful things from it: a son, with whom I grow more obsessed every passing day, and a book that I am immensely proud of. For me, Throwback is a testament to resilience. We are all breaking cycles here, but maybe we’re also building something new. Something that can withstand an ever-changing world, not just with toughness and grit — but also with a nimble grace. That’s the dream I pass down to my readers, and to my son.

From the November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Single copies of this issue are available for $15.00 including postage and may be ordered from:

Horn Book Magazine Customer Service
hbmsubs@pcspublink.com

Full subscription information is here.