What inspired Where the River Meets the Moon: Stardust? What made you want it to be your debut novel?

Stardust began with a conversation during a car ride to a lake in China in September 2008—just four months after the Wenchuan Earthquake. I was in Grade 6, and my cousin was in Grade 4. As the road unspooled outside the window, I told her a story I had recently learned about Xue Xiao, the “Coke Boy.” Halfway through, a realization struck me with startling clarity: this should be a book.

By then, I had already spent months researching Xue Xiao and his classmates from Class 6, Grade 11. I knew their names, their dynamics, their silences. I felt closer to them than to anyone around me. I remember thinking—boldly, naïvely—that I could write something deeper and more truthful than the news reports, journal articles, or inspirational pieces I had read. My cousin agreed instantly and offered to illustrate it. The decision felt sealed on the spot. That book was going to exist.

What I didn’t know then was that it would take nearly two decades to arrive.

Over the next five years, I obsessively outlined and conducted what I jokingly called “archaeology”—digging through survivors’ blogs, watching documentaries, and rereading news coverage late into the night. The project grew rapidly, expanding from a single book into a four-book series tracing the lives of earthquake survivors from childhood into early adulthood. In 2011, I completed my first full series outline.

In 2013, when I was sixteen, I began writing seriously—collecting research notes, fragments of dialogue, and early drafts in my iPhone. Then one day, my phone crashed. Everything I had written between 2008 and 2013 vanished. I skipped P.E., hid in the gym, and cried as if I had lost a part of myself. When survivor friends found out, they comforted me gently and told me, with unexpected certainty, that I would write something better one day. Better than what was lost.

That afternoon—rainy, quiet, devastating—I made a promise to them. I told them I would one day turn their stories into fiction and bring them into the public world. I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment my future crystallized.

I spent the next three years building a far more rigorous outline—one that surpassed everything I had done before. In the summer of 2016, at nineteen, I attempted to write the book for the first time. I failed. After a few thousand words, I realized I didn’t yet possess the lived experience, emotional range, or historical distance to write about a generation whose lives had already diverged so far from my own. The gap was too wide.

So I waited.

During that waiting period, I lived deliberately—pushing myself into unfamiliar places, cultures, relationships, and risks. My goal was simple: to grow fast enough to catch up to their rhythms.

Then came the pandemic.

I was studying in a French immersion program in Quebec City, living in the basement of a French Canadian family. Lockdown was isolating and brutal. I was depressed, heartbroken, and trapped in a relationship that diminished me. One evening, my neighbour—a writer in her mid-seventies—slipped me a note. It was shaped like a small circle and read: “This is your round to it, whenever you are ready.”

I held it under a dim lamp and cried. Something inside me reignited. The book returned—not as an obligation, but as a lifeline. I knew then that it would be written in the 2020s.

I wrote the first book in the Where the River Meets the Moon series in 2021, and the second between 2022 and 2024. Stardust is the third book—but it is also the first. It was the seed planted during that 2008 car ride. Every other book in the series orbits around it, either as its preface or its aftermath.

That is why Stardust is my debut.

Not because I don’t love the first two books—one a middle-grade novel, the other a sports story about basketball, friendship, and mental health—but because I want to enter the literary world with this identity first. I want my name to be associated with the Wenchuan Earthquake, with the lives it shaped, and with the generation that grew up in its shadow.

This book is my most urgent and intimate offering. It carries eighteen years of devotion, research, friendship, and lived history. If there is one place where my work must begin, it is here.