Abigail Hing Wen sets sail from her bestselling Loveboat series to chart new territory in the rom-com thriller Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies, her first standalone YA novel. Though the romantic chemistry between Chinese American Bay area teenagers Tan Lee and Winter Woo is palpable, the fact that Winter and her mother are the Lee family’s tenants complicate matters. Then all three parents jet off on vacation, leaving Tan and Winter to babysit Tan’s five-year-old sister Sana on their own. The unexpected arrival of Tan’s ex-girlfriend proves to be a complication too many—especially when she reveals that she’s carting goods she stole from her father, whom she fled in Shanghai. Worse, his hired thugs are in pursuit, forcing the teens on the run. Wen spoke with PW about branching out into different genres, drawing from her background in tech, and the joys of subverting expectations.
In your acknowledgments, you write that Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies originally started out as “The Idiom Algorithm,” your contribution to Serendipity, an anthology edited by Marissa Meyer. Can you talk about the process of turning that short story into your first standalone novel?
When Marissa reached out to ask if I would join her anthology, I was totally thrilled. My kid had been reading her books for years, so when I got on the call, my kid got to say hello, and that was a big moment for me.
In terms of “The Idiom Algorithm” itself, Marissa said she wanted us to invert tropes. I chose class warfare. It’s something that I kind of inherently lived because my mom was from a wealthy family in the Philippines and my dad was from a very poor family in Indonesia. I grew up with that divide within my own home, so I’ve always gravitated to those types of stories.
In my short story, this wealthy parachute girl from Palo Alto announces that she’s dating a guy from “the wrong side of the tracks,” and her mom slaps her and sends her to Asia. That was actually inspired by something that happened to somebody I knew. I always felt like, “Oh, this poor guy.” He was told he was not good enough for her family. But to invert the trope, I wrote that he would try to go after her and find her and save her from her parents. He thought he was the hero, but he finds out that she was actually quite happy to go, and that he was the one pressuring her to live her life in a way that she wasn’t comfortable with.
My editor, Liz Szabla, loved the characters so much that she asked if I would consider continuing the story. She’d had this idea for the setup of a book being about babysitting. But since I was making the Love in Taipei movie at the time, I felt this need to add high stakes. I wanted something bigger. Having Rebecca come back with all her resources and the crazy world that she comes from kind of made sense. I love writing stories about teenagers doing extraordinary things; and yet, in this book, they’re also teenagers doing ordinary things. I love being able to do a blend of both. From there, Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies was born.
How did your experience working in tech inform your approach to the titular coding and conspiracies?
My whole family is really into coding and gaming, so we play a lot of games together. That was some of the inspiration for Tan’s family.
I find that the Bay Area is kind of the center of the universe right now, in terms of tech, because tech reaches everybody in the world, and it’s transformed how we live so quickly. The way kids grow up in Silicon Valley is so fascinating. It’s so different than how I grew up in Ohio. Young people make up the bulk of the workforce in Silicon Valley because they have really fresh, creative ideas and new ways of approaching things. And my insider’s view is that these types of interests translate well into tech work—the algorithms, the math, it’s all just interesting, fun puzzles. I think there’s a part of me that’s trying to democratize that knowledge. I want to let young people know that their interests can actually parlay into a very lucrative career. So much of what happens in the tech world is very possible for them to access, so I tried to capture that in the main characters: three Palo Alto high school kids who are really bright and have a lot of resources.
In what ways is Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies different from your Loveboat series, and what can fans of that universe expect to find here?
I was thrilled to write a book outside of Taipei. I actually tried to set books two and three of Loveboat outside of Taipei, but everyone agreed that it should stay there. So this one’s much closer to my home in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I think Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies feels more realistically young adult than the Loveboat series. I feel like my Loveboat books read more like fantasy novels. Even though they don’t take place in fantasy novels, it still feels like this portal fantasy of a girl getting to experience another world and another culture, and she comes back transformed, whereas this story mostly happens in their own backyard.
But readers of my prior books will recognize the depth of character that I explore. There’s an emotional journey for each of them. Tan has imposter syndrome. He doesn’t know that he can use his coding skills as a weapon until these international thugs target him. And then Rebecca is a parachute kid who’s kind of similar to Xavier’s family from the Loveboat series. Rebecca is running away from her family, but she eventually finds a home. And it’s a really unusual way to find a home that I think will surprise readers.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on an unannounced middle grade novel about artificial intelligence, and I’m also directing a short prequel film for it.
Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies by Abigail Hing Wen. Feiwel and Friends, $19.99 Aug. 13, ISBN 978-1-250-88323-0
