Thanhha Lai | |
|---|---|
| Born | Lại T. Thanh Hà January 1, 1965 |
| Nationality | Vietnamese-American |
| Education | New York University (MFA) |
| Alma mater | University of Texas at Austin |
| Occupation | Young novel author |
| Notable work | Inside Out & Back Again |
| Family | Unnamed mother and six older brothers 2 sisters along with a husband and daughter(according to Inside Out & Back Again) |
| Website | www.thanhhalai.com |
Thanhha Lai (Vietnamese: Lai T. Thanh Hà; born January 1, 1965) is a Vietnamese-American writer of children's literature. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People's Literature[1][2] and a Newbery Honor[3] for her debut novel, Inside Out & Back Again, which was published by HarperCollins.
Lai was born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), on January 1, 1965. She has six older brothers. Ten years later, she fled Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon, with her family. She then moved to Alabama and graduated from University of Texas, Austin with a degree in journalism in 1988, and worked for about two years for the Orange County, California newspaper The Register, covering news about Little Saigon, the local Vietnamese community. She earned a Master of Fine Arts from New York University and moved to New York, where she teaches at Parsons The New School for Design. Today, she goes by Thanhhà Lại on her website and lives in Croton-on-Hudson.[4][5]
Virginia Wolff interviewed Lai for the January 2010 number of School Library Journal. She calls Inside Out "a powerful story in slender, sinewy prose poems, just a few words in each line." Hà and her family flee home and meet America's "sharp-edged barriers of color, ethnicity, religion, and custom."[6]
Lai worked for 30 years on an adult novel. In her own words it was "third-person omniscient, spanning 4000 years of Vietnamese history, and whiplashed by hundreds of overly dramatic, showy sentences." The transformation worked when she got "inside the mind of a 10-year-old girl who feels as much as an adult but can’t express the emotions yet, it seemed right to employ a few precise, pungent words and have them explode into real, raw emotions."[6]
The fictional girl Hà once says, "No one would believe me, but at times I would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama." The story features her discovery of an adjustment to "the foreign world of Alabama". A review by "especially poignant as she cycles from feeling smart in Vietnam to struggling in the States, and finally regains academic and social confidence."[7]
Lai explains, "She felt dumb in Vietnam.... For her, being smart equated to confidence that she could manage her world. That’s why she would choose wartime in Saigon over peacetime in Alabama." In America, the little girl writes,
