Every story has a secret origin, a moment when something invisible decides it wants to become words. For the MoMo and YinYin series, that moment came during a quiet afternoon in a small apartment in Taipei, watching a child build a fortress out of sofa cushions while the grown-ups talked about why he wasn't like the other kids. He was different—brilliant in his own way, but the world kept handing him a script that didn't fit.
That image stayed with me: a child building his own world because the one he was given had no room for him. MoMo was born from that image—a curious, slightly clumsy little bear who sees the world at a different angle. YinYin, his quiet friend, arrived soon after. She speaks softly, thinks deeply, and notices what others miss. Together they stumble through small adventures that feel large because, to a child, everything is large.
The core theme of the series is deceptively simple: every child is different. Not in the saccharine, all-children-are-special way that empties the phrase of meaning. Different in the practical, daily way—the child who needs extra time to answer, the child who feels too much, the child who draws on the walls because the feeling inside is too big for words. The stories don't explain these children to themselves; they show them living, struggling, and finding their way.
Writing the series bilingually was its own kind of adventure. English and Chinese do not sit neatly beside one another. A sentence that sings in one language becomes awkward in the other. I found myself writing paragraphs twice, not as translations but as companions—each version carrying a slightly different emotional weight. In Chinese, MoMo might express hesitation with a single sigh: 哦. In English, the moment needs three sentences. Learning to trust both languages, to let them be imperfect mirrors of each other, taught me something about the children the books are for. They, too, live between worlds.
The biggest surprise was how much the stories would teach me. I had started writing MoMo and YinYin for children who don't fit the mold. But the mold, I came to realize, is made by adults. Children do not need to fit. They need to be seen—their full, messy, magnificent selves—and they need stories that reflect back what they already know: that being different is not a problem to be solved but a way of being in the world.
There is a moment in every MoMo and YinYin book where one of them makes a mistake. Not a cute, teachable mistake, but a real one—the kind that hurts someone's feelings or breaks something important. And the story does not rush to fix it. It lets the mistake sit, lets the characters feel sorry, lets them find their own way toward repair. This, I think, is what children need most: not stories where everything works out perfectly, but stories where imperfect creatures keep going anyway.
MoMo and YinYin found their voice in the space between languages, between expectation and reality, between the child we were told to be and the child we actually were. If the books reach even one child who has felt unseen, if they offer even one sentence that whispers you are not too much, you are not too little, you are exactly enough—then the secret origin, that quiet afternoon in Taipei, will have been worth everything.