Truth in tales: How illustrator Hanna Cha's dragons symbolize her Korean American experience

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Truth in tales: How illustrator Hanna Cha's dragons symbolize her Korean American experience

Published: 03 Dec. 2024, 08:44

LEE JIAN
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

[Interview]

Writer and illustrator Hanna Cha poses for photos after an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at Signiel Busan on Friday. [LEE JIAN]

BUSAN — A little boy encounters two dragons: a fiery red creature, indestructible and fearsome, and another with blue scales and flowing whiskers, ethereal and omniscient.

But which is real? And what is the true dragon?

The children's book “The Truth About Dragons” (2023) celebrates the experience of Asian Americans, traversing two distinctly different cultural landscapes — as depicted through the East and the West’s perceptions of dragons.

Illustrations for ″The Truth About Dragons″ by Hanna Cha [HANNA CHA]

Illustrator Hanna Cha used pen nibs for the Western dragon in the first half of the book and minhwa, or the Korean folk-art style with ink and calligraphy brushes, for the latter half’s Eastern dragon.

The work won her, and writer Julie Leung, this year’s Caldecott Medal, considered one of the most prestigious honors for American children’s book artists.

Illustrations for ″The Truth About Dragons″ (2023) by Hanna Cha, written by Julie Leung [HANNA CHA]

“When I first read Julie’s manuscript, I cried,” said Cha, 30, who felt like the book was speaking directly to her experience as a Korean American. “I then begged to be on the project because I wanted kids to feel what I had experienced,” she told the Korea JoongAng Daily in an interview at Busan Signiel on Friday.

She was attending the Busan International Children's Book Fair as a keynote speaker. “After years of just me loving Korea, yesterday [Thursday] felt like Korea was finally loving me back,” she said.

Hanna Cha gives a keynote speech at the Busan International Children's Book Fair at Bexco on Thursday. [KOREA PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION]

Growing up, Cha moved around a lot. Her parents were in South Carolina for her father’s PhD studies when she and her brother were born. She then grew up jumping around a few states in the South until second grade, when her family returned to Korea.

But only after five years, in her first year of middle school, her parents decided that it would be better for Cha and her brother to study in the United States.

Though the decision was made with good intentions, Cha said she didn’t really want to go back. “I felt like I was finally fitting in and making friends. I was thinking in Korean and interacting in a Korean sense.”

Illustrations in ″Tiny Feet Between the Mountains” (2019) by Hanna Cha, written by Cha [HANNA CHA]

American high school life was much more different from what she had remembered about her young adolescent experience.

She was always a little shy growing up, but high school was when a "more severe form of introversion” kicked in, to the point that she had trouble speaking to people outside her close circle of family and friends.

“I was scared, I think, of the idea that people were judging me, and I was just not sure who I was,” she said. “It was a unique situation, and I felt like no one, not even my parents, could quite understand what I was going through.”

Illustration of ″The House Before Falling Into the Sea″ by Hanna Cha, in the book written by Ann Suk Wang, illustrated [HANNA CHA]

But everything changed when she discovered joy in art. “It quite literally became my voice,” she said.

Cha found herself creating art about herself and how she wanted to be perceived in the world. Lost in that joy, she felt free from the constant social pressures to define herself.

“But you don’t have to, really,” she said. “I later realized that it doesn’t matter how American and Korean you are. I used art to carve my own space. And once I had that, for the first time in my life, I actually wanted to speak up and talk to other people.”

She enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design as an illustration student, not quite sure about what her exact career would be, but confident that she wanted to tell stories through art.

Preliminary sketches of ″The Truth About Dragons″ (2023) illustrations [HANNA CHA]

She was steered to children’s books when she submitted a sample of her senior year project, an illustration book incorporating Korean folk culture, “Tiny Feet Between the Mountain,” for a Simon and Schuster student event. Her work caught the eye of an editor, and it became her debut book in 2019.

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing, with Cha saying that she only recently became a full-time illustrator and writer.

“For a while, I did a lot of odd jobs to make this work. I had side work at a crepe place, which became more of a full-time thing during Covid, and then I blinked and was like, ‘Why am I a supervisor?”

When she received the Caldecott in January, it was “a completely unexpected honor.” “Us illustrators always say that [this profession] is a marathon — that it is a long run.”

Illustrations in ″Tiny Feet Between the Mountains” (2019) by Hanna Cha, written by Cha [HANNA CHA]

The accolade came much earlier than she thought, but Cha feels she is far from her career peak, saying she has many more stories she wants to tell in the future.

“I don’t want to be pigeonholed to one genre or as being able to only tell Korean American stories [...] and many of my books have also been about my struggles with personal identity,” she said.

“But now I feel like I can tell stories that are a little more detached from those raw emotions and write more about what I want and hope for in life.”

Just as the little boy between the two dragons realizes at the end that there doesn't have to be only one true story about dragons in the world, there are often more answers than what it seemingly presents.

“It’s liberating to know that sometimes, you don’t have to choose," said Cha with a warm smile.