I’d like to thank the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards Committee for this incredible honor. Thirteen-year-old Ruth would never have believed that her story was something worth telling, let alone something to be celebrated. She might’ve worked harder on her diary if she’d known!

Photo: Cynthia K. Ritter.

When I first set out to make a graphic nonfiction book, I wanted to tell my father’s story. He was born during the second Sino-Japanese War, after his family fled into the mountains in southern China. His birth took place in a manger — like someone else we might know — and it was a survival story my grandmother told so many times, it became family lore.

But when I tried to write that version of the book, it felt like something was missing. My brilliant agent, Rebecca Sherman, suggested I weave in my own story about leaving everything I knew and moving to Hong Kong as a teen, and only then did Uprooted finally come together.

With that shift, the heart of this book grew into something more. It became a reminder to myself and to young readers that every story matters — including theirs. That we can do hard things. And that we’re not alone. When I hear how a family adopted my dad’s and my Talk-to-Talk routine, or how this book helped an eleven-year-old through her own big move, I’m reminded of the power of books. Books go beyond what we can possibly imagine for them and can create moments of good where we least expect it.

[Read Horn Book reviews of the 2025 BGHB Nonfiction winners.]

I want to thank Rebecca Sherman, Andrea Morrison, and Laura Gruszka for helping me shape this book from just an idea. Thank you to Connie Hsu, my editor, who understands the splendor of Asian malls and the chaos of Chinese families. To Nico Ore-Giron, Kirk Benshoff, Sunny Lee, Niccolo Pizarro, and the entire Roaring Brook/First Second/Macmillan team — thank you.

Thanks to my family and friends in Hong Kong for letting me put them in a book, and to Mom and Dad for tolerating teenage Ruth (and, let’s be honest, adult Ruth too). Thanks to my 嫲嫲, my paternal grandmother, who taught us patience, courage, and perseverance — qualities this graphic novel most definitely required.

Finally, to the young readers who saw a little bit of themselves in adolescent Ruth: thank you for laughing with her, growing with her, and finding pieces of your story in hers.

There’s one final story we couldn’t fit in the book, so I’ll tell it now. When my dad was thirteen, my grandmother took him to an apartment in Hong Kong. As soon as the woman opened the door, my grandmother said, “Remember the baby you told me to throw away during the war? Well, I didn’t. And here he is.” My dad remembers standing tall that day — proud to be a demonstration of such incredible strength and love.

And now here I am, nearly seventy years later, standing tall, hoping this book can demonstrate the same. 多謝大家. Thank you.

From the January/February 2026 issue of The Horn Book Magazine. For more on the 2025 Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, click on the tag BGHB25.

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