For Kelly Yang—best known for her popular Front Desk middle grade series, a humorous and clear-eyed account of the ups and downs of immigrant life in America in the early 1990s—the journey to picture books was circular, and surprising. The contemporary picture book format is economical in words but expansive in emotional impact. Yang drafted her narrative picture book debut, Little Bird Laila, which tells the story of a Chinese American child who translates for her immigrant parents, in 2017. But it “sat on my computer,” she says via phone from her home in Los Angeles. “I knew I wanted to write about this experience. I knew the beginning, but I didn’t know how to take it all the way home. I couldn’t think through the entire arc of the story.”
Yang had thought she’d be happy writing middle grade and YA fiction “for a long time.” She said as much in a 2020 interview with PW: “Picture books are amazing, but they’re so challenging to write. I have an inability to keep it simple.” She now laughs at this recollection. She persevered and, in April, Dial will publish Little Bird Laila.
“I wanted to write a story about this particular aspect of my life,” Yang says. “My mom would call me her ‘little bird.’ She would say, ‘Come here, little bird’ ” and ask Yang to translate a bank statement or loan application. “I wanted this story to be a picture book, because I wanted to visually see a kid who feels triumphant in one moment, but also burdened in another, and it’s all so overwhelming.”
Laila’s predicament is ubiquitous, Yang says. “It’s universal; a lot of families tackle this issue. And maybe it’s not about English, but there’s something that’s different that we have to try to understand and explain to our parents, like, here’s how the college admissions process works, or, here’s how to get a loan. For my mom, that was such a mystery, and it took all of us figuring it out together for us to feel like we had a chance in this country. I remember feeling this strong sense that I was important. I wanted that to be on the page.”
Illustrator Xindi Yan captures the spectrum of emotions that come with translating for a parent, and Yang was thrilled with her artwork. “There’s a heartbreaking scene in this book where other kids realize Laila’s parents can’t read English, and Laila feels both a sense of protectiveness over her parents, but also pride in this job,” Yang says. “This family is going through hard times, but Xindi does a good job of capturing their joy.”
Yang often has adult readers in mind when she writes. “When I read picture books, I always read them with my 11-year-old daughter,” she says. “It’s super fun if a book can start a conversation; that’s an opportunity for me to tell her something about my life. There’s opportunity all over this book. It’s often prohibitively expensive for new immigrants to come up with the money and the time to learn a new language. It allows kids and their caregivers to talk about issues of equity and the realities of life.”
She also hopes that adults who have had the experience of translating for their parents, like her, “feel seen and can talk about it,” she says. “It can be a bonding experience—beautiful, funny, empowering.”
Yang came to the United States from China at age six and, as a tween, helped her parents manage motels in Southern California, where they settled—often by taking charge of the front desk. A bit of a prodigy, at 13 she entered University of California–Berkeley, where she studied political science, and then went to Harvard Law School, also as a teenager. Shortly after earning her degree, she left the legal field in pursuit of writing for children.
Her debut, Front Desk (2018), drew inspiration from real life: Mia Tang, age 10, manages the front desk of the Calivista Motel and tends to its guests, while her immigrant parents clean the rooms. The book was a bestseller and was awarded the 2019 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature and named a PW best book, among many other honors.
Its success spawned four—soon to be five—sequels. Yang’s YA novel Parachutes, about sexual misconduct
at an elite private school, is based on her own experiences at Harvard.
Immigrant life is a central concern in Yang’s works, alongside themes of identity, the struggle to find one’s voice or to be heard, and family and friendship. Little Bird Laila, she says, illuminates an immigrant family’s early days of navigating a new language and culture. In Front Desk, “we skipped over the initial phase of being a newcomer calling the utilities company to make sure the lights stay on”; Little Bird Laila is a “prequel,” of sorts.
Yang’s other 2025 release, Chef’s Secret (Scholastic Press, June), is the sixth book in her Front Desk series and is told from the point of view of Jason Yao, Mia’s tormentor in Front Desk. At its heart, the series is “about not judging people or coming to conclusions about them until you understand what they’ve gone through,” Yang says. Readers “have had a lot of judgment about Jason, some of it rightfully so, because he was a bit of a booger in the first book.” In this volume, fans learn Jason’s backstory—his secrets, his talents, his fears. “He’s going to steal your heart,” she adds.
Yang’s work has landed in the crosshairs of book banners: Front Desk was challenged in Plainedge (N.Y.) School District for being “anti-racist,” because racism targeting Chinese and Mexican immigrants, as well as institutional racism directed against Black Americans, is an explicit topic of the book. She has also been vocal about surging xenophobia against Asian Americans during the pandemic; New from Here (2023) follows an Asian American boy fighting to keep his family together and standing up to racism during the initial outbreak of Covid-19.
Little Bird Laila is a vital resource, Yang says, especially during these turbulent political times. “It’s critically important that we make everyone feel like they are part of this country, that they belong here, that they have a voice, that they’re being seen. My own parents have been citizens forever, but with these deportations that may be coming, they wonder whether we are going to be impacted as citizens. This is a reality of being an immigrant in this country—we don’t know what’s going to happen, which is why it’s so important that books like this convey to people that our stories and our lives are permanent, no matter who is in power.”
Pooja Makhijani is a writer and editor in New Jersey.
