Why is everyone in Dragonhearted Chinese?

My dear, lovely editor, Daphne, who is always pushing me to write better, asked me this question: “Why is everyone in Dragonhearted Chinese?”

I almost wanted to answer I don’t know, but I’d originally written about how Shu Ping and Four Eyes were sort of meant to be Malay and Indian respectively, but it didn’t fit their characters. That immediately fell away when I started writing the book, and so did everything else.

Dragonhearted is also very Chinese because the school in which the protagonist is from is a very Chinese school. We have to learn how to recite Tang poems and we also had to take advanced Chinese from Primary 1-6, something that I also failed at. Many of the kids are mixed race, and I have made friends with them, but the kids are mostly Chinese.

We were, of course, encouraged to make friends with people who are not Chinese, but my neighbours also happened to be Chinese, and so, I didn’t have Malay friends until very much later. I don’t like to think of myself as sheltered, and I wasn’t, but spending most of the time in a Chinese environment as a child translated to the book.

More importantly, everyone in Dragonhearted is Chinese, because it’s much easier to write about a Chinese person than to slap on a race on some character under the pretext of diversity and get everything wrong. I wanted to avoid tokenism, among other things, and also, obviously, getting the culture wrong. It takes ages and ages to do research on a culture, and I would imagine that research into another culture takes twice as long.

I don’t know if the protagonist of the next few stories will be of another race, but if so, there is always the internet, the library, and my friends of other races to help me.

But the most important thing is always to write a story that is authentic, and thinking that I have to tick all the boxes in the race card defeats the purpose of what I want to do as a writer.