When Betty C. Tang’s Parachute Kids was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2023, not many American readers knew what the titular term meant. It refers to undocumented, underage kids who move to a new country while their parents remain in their homeland—something true of the story’s 10-year-old Feng-Ling Lin and her two older siblings, whose mom and dad are back in Taiwan—as well as to Tang herself.

Now Tang returns to 1980s California with Outsider Kids (Graphix/Scholastic, April 4), a sequel that further explores the Lins’ turbulent adjustment to American life, digging deeper into the challenges, the confusion, and the joys that tie the siblings together.

Tang, who lives in Los Angeles, recently spoke with Kirkus via Zoom about returning to this story and the process of creating a graphic novel. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Did you always conceive this as a multibook series?

When [I first pitched] Parachute Kids, nobody outside the Asian community really knew the term or even about the existence of these kids. My editor at Scholastic acquired two books at the outset, but we didn't know then whether the second book would be a sequel. So I devised Parachute Kids as a stand-alone book, on the chance it flopped. Still, in my mind, it was always supposed to be the first story in a trilogy. I am very happy that Parachute Kids has been so well received; it opened the door for Outsider Kids, as well as a third book in the series.

In your afterword to Parachute Kids, you talk about pulling from your own life. Is that equally true in the second book?

Even though the book is fiction, there are many snippets of myself in Outsider Kids, particularly with Feng-Ling and her faux pas. But I wanted to tell a story that was bigger than my family’s experiences, because we came through relatively unscathed compared to other parachute kids. I wanted to take the story to a larger level and draw out meaningful conversations about the nuances and daily realities that undocumented kids face, such as forging notes from absent parents and lying to friends about their parents’ whereabouts—things that aren’t often examined.

You’ve made some really interesting craft and design choices. I love the color cues that are used to distinguish languages.

I can’t take credit for that. Originally, I wanted black text for English and red for Chinese over a white bubble, but I was told that text could only be printed in one of the CMYK colors. The clever folks over at Graphix had the idea to use a yellow bubble under a magenta text, which makes the text appear red. The result is great. Creating a graphic novel really is a team effort.

I’d love to talk about the title of this book, because in some ways the siblings seem less like outsiders than they were in Parachute Kids. But you highlight subtle ways in which they still are.

It’s true that in Parachute Kids, the siblings are more outsiders, in that they’ve just arrived in the U.S. What I wanted to explore in Outsider Kids is the limbo phase after you’ve settled in a new country and suddenly find yourself in between two cultures. You’re disconnected from your home country but don’t yet belong to your new one. It’s such a precarious, vulnerable time. Just when you think you’re starting to fit in, a bump along the road can make you feel like an outsider again. 

That crystallizes in your portrayal of Feng-Ling’s older brother, Ke-Gāng, whose sexuality makes him an outsider in both Taiwan and America.

Ke-Gāng is the character that’s most solid in my mind. Readers seem to find him compelling, too—I’ve gotten so many letters and messages from readers all over the world, specifically wanting to find out what will happen to him. I felt a strong need to include a LGBTQIA+ voice because prejudice, unfortunately, is still prevalent in many Chinese communities due to deep-seated traditional beliefs and stereotypes. Through Ke-Gāng’s heart-wrenching story, I hope [people’s] views may be reexamined and the gap between understandings bridged.

Josephine, the cousin, throws a carefully established equilibrium into chaos: Though she and her mother are in the process of moving from Taiwan to L.A., Josephine is a violin prodigy who’s attended international schools and is much more comfortable in America than Feng-Ling is. Did you plan her from the beginning?

I definitely planned her this way. I wanted her to come in and disrupt the life that Feng-Ling had worked so hard to build. I wanted to use Josephine as another vehicle to emphasize how one’s actions can affect others and that we should all take care in how we interact with one another. But she was a very difficult character to write. I didn’t want her to be a one-faceted villain in the story. She needed more dimensionality. Whether or not to redeem her, that was my big question.

I love that you keep it uncomfortable. You made her a real, complex person, and the reader’s not necessarily going to sympathize with the things she does. But she also demonstrates so many of the pressures that kids in this situation can be under.

A lot of Asian kids grow up under immense pressure, especially if their parents have high academic expectations. I escaped that to some degree because I came [to the U.S.] when I was Feng-Ling’s age, but I saw it through my older siblings, who did nothing but study. That kind of intensity becomes ingrained, and you end up pressuring yourself not to disappoint your parents. For Josephine, the expectation is high. She’s not only a violin prodigy, but also speaks four languages. On the surface, she seems enviable, but deep down, she’s really holding up a front that hides her own insecurities and a family that’s falling apart.

Tell us about the decision to open the book with the American holiday of Halloween and end with the Chinese celebration of the New Year.

Halloween is the quintessential American holiday. No one else has it. I alluded a little bit to the Chinese Ghost month in August, and that’s lunar August. But it’s a month where you’re supposed to be extra wary. I wanted to contrast that with Feng-Ling’s first Halloween and how excited she is to go trick-or-treating and get candy. The other holiday the siblings experience is Thanksgiving, where they collectively make lots of faux pas. I just love highlighting the little nuances we’re so used to but that are strange to newcomers.

To end on Chinese New Year was very meaningful for me. The family is going through something traumatic, and the familiarity of the holiday brings them calm and a sense of new beginnings.

That ending is so effective. Without giving too much away, why was it important to leave these characters where you did?

It was very important because I put the siblings through so much in this book. I wanted to leave them—and readers—with the hope that maybe, finally, the Lins won’t remain outsiders anymore—especially with their journey continuing in Book 3.

Maggie Reagan is a program manager for the American Library Association and lives in Chicago.