WOW Reads: MSRAP Reads Don't Cause Trouble By Arree Chung

Join the Worlds of Words Center Middle School Reading Ambassadors (MSRAP) as we recap our experience around Don’t Cause Trouble by Arree Chung.

In this episode, we talk about... 

• Our Star Burger orders.
• Awkward moments in middle school life and being “halfway to somewhere.”
• Our creative processes, both digital and with physical media, in writing and illustration.
• The Cold War and Communism in China.
• We recommend this book for “the whole world."

This podcast was recorded in the Digital Innovation and Learning Lab (DIALL) in the U of A College of Education.

Producer/Host: Rebecca Ballenger, Worlds of Words Center Associate Director
Lit Discussant: Narges Zandi, U of A COE Graduate Assistant
Audio Engineer: Alexis Mendoza, Worlds of Words Student Employee and U of A Art Major
Coordinator: Vianey Torres, Worlds of Words Student Employee and U of A Nursing Major
Digital Collaborator: Melanie Reyes, Worlds of Words Student Employee and U of A First-year Student

For more information on the Worlds of Words Middle School Reading Ambassadors (MSRAP), visit wowlit.org.

Today's podcast episode music is Claim to Fame - The Gray Room by Clark Sims.

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We Can Promote Global Literature Together!

The Worlds of Words Reading Ambassador program is completely free for participants who receive a book for themselves and a book to share with their school librarian, ELA/English teacher, or other school entity. If you would like to support this program, please make a gift on-line through the University of Arizona Foundation.

Thank you for listening and keep reading!

Transcript

Hello and welcome to WOW Reads, a podcast from Worlds of Words that features young people and teens talking about books written for them.

World of Words Center of Global Literacies and Literatures is committed to creating an international network of people who share the vision of bringing books and children together, thereby opening windows on the world.

Worlds of Words Reading Ambassadors engage in a university experience of children's literature within the University of Arizona College of Education. Reading ambassadors learn about literature for young people under the direction of faculty and staff with expertise in children's literature, education, library science and marketing.

We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of indigenous peoples. Today, Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized tribes, with Tucson being home to the O'odham and the Yaqui. Committed to diversity and inclusion, the university strives to build sustainable relationships with sovereign native nations and indigenous communities through education offerings, partnerships, and community service.

Arree Chung, author and illustrator, is an artist, teacher, and interpreter. He loves telling stories, playing basketball, and sparking the joy of creating and others for writing, art, and learning resources, visit him at arree.com. Twelve-year-old Ming Lee hopes middle school will be a fresh start he needs.

My name is Rebecca Ballenger, I'm the associate director for Worlds of Words, and my Star Burger order definitely would involve hot french fries, regular Coke with lots of ice, and a burger with pickles and mustard.

Well, I'm Altair, and my order would be a Dr. Pepper, some fries, and tacos.

Hi, I'm Adriana, and my order would probably be a pink lemonade, a burger, and some hot french fries.

Hi, I'm Kamilla, and my Star Burger order would be something with bacon and mayo.

Hi, my name is Audrie, and my Star Burger order would be a cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake.

I'm Milo, my Star Burger order would be a strawberry banana smoothie, fries, and a double cheeseburger plain.

I'm Catalina and my Star Burger order would be a Dr. Pepper large with hot fries.

Oh, my gosh, I could eat some hot fries right now, actually. Today we had the pleasure of meeting Arree Chung. Author, illustrator, creator of the graphic novel Don't Cause Trouble. Somebody tell me what that was like meeting him. 

I really liked meeting him because he had a lot of things to share about his childhood and his family and things he thought about when writing this book.

I thought it was really cool, too, because, as she said, I liked learning about his childhood, and I really liked learning about what his extended family went through during the Cold War with the communism in China.

I really thought it was interesting all the little parts in the books that were actually real and actually happened in his life.

Yeah, Arree shared a lot of really interesting childhood experiences and how they can be incorporated into writing. Some of them were quite humorous, can you remember something that happened in the book that you thought was particularly funny, and maybe even a little bit relatable? 

I thought when they're trick or treating and doing the wrestling because it reminds me a lot of my friend group at school playing around in grassy fields.

I thought it was funny when his mom would pack lunch in McDonald's bags when they went to school, and all the kids wanted to trade, even though it turns out it was just homemade meals in the bag. 

Which he said he was actually thankful for those homemade meals, but yeah, he had to grow up first. I thought it was really funny, the idea of his mom standing up in church and sort of telling everybody's business, can you imagine if your mom did that?

I really enjoyed when his dad asked for a candy tax. 10% of what he got on Halloween. 

Did your parents tax your Halloween candy? 

No, but I do trade with my brother. 

Same.

My dad taxes my candy. He takes it all, he puts it in a bucket, and he puts it at the top of the refrigerator so only he can eat it.

What other kinds of ways did you connect with this book? 

Well, I did cut my hair when I was little, like, by myself. When everybody was asleep, I would get out of my bed, grab very big scissors, and then cut a piece of my hair off. 

But did you look good? 

Uh no, I had a bald spot.

How did your parents react? 

My mom was devastated. 

Devastated. 

My dad could not see, but my mom, she could see it. 

So there was, a theme that came up in Don't Cause Trouble that came up in our first book with Jose Pimienta, Halfway To Somewhere. So anybody want to talk about that a little bit?

Both of them felt like they were seen differently or like, in Don't Cause Trouble he imagined himself as an alien or on a different planet because of how he was different from everyone else. And I feel like the main character in Halfway To Somewhere also felt like that because she was different. She moved there. 

Let's switch gears and talk a little bit about the creative process.

Arree really talked to us about a couple of different experiences that you might have. One of them was about the different steps involved in creating a story, and then the other one was about the business of writing, authoring, and illustrating a book. Will somebody please talk about that a little bit? 

What I do first is I collect ideas. I usually do this with my own experiences of fooling around and doing things that I personally find funny. 

Usually I take old drawings and I make them a little bit better and start drawing little things so you could see a little bit better than it originally was before. 

When I'm drawing, whenever I add things to my little drawings of people, I feel like I do it so then it gives them a type of personality or just like a sense of what's the setting or like, who are they? 

So that's a lot about the creative process. It's so cool that you are feeling comfortable to draw because sometimes people get stuck in that drawing and they'll be like "oh, I'm not, I can't, I don't know how to draw" and then you stop and you never get to grow beyond that. But then there was a discipline that came with it too. Arree talked about how long it would take and how many drafts a person would go through. In fact, he had a metaphor for it, a little bit, that working up that stamina for this creative process is very similar to working of the stamina as as an athlete, you have to practice a little bit every day. Is that advice that you think that you could bring into your practice creating? 

There are some nods. Yes. 

I think that I could take it into practice because you have to practice drawing every day so you could create better art from what you've already created.

If you practice drawing every day, you could get better than you were when you started to draw so that you could go farther and farther into life and you could be an artist like Da Vinci. 

That's a big goal right there. 

Out of drawing, like practicing, It helps you to get a better understanding of your instrument. So then you play what you want to play, and you think you sound good, and you make other people think like you're good at whatever instrument you play. 

So Arree showed us his studio a little bit. He has a place where he does the physical drawings, and a place where he does the computer component, if you think about your life and your creative processes and what you do in your free time, do you have that kind of balance between the physical act of creation and a digital act of creation?

I usually create PowerPoint presentations for my stories but I also draw out my other stories in sketchbooks just for fun at school, and anywhere where I'm feeling bored. 

So when you're creating, when some of the others of you have expressed that you're drawing, are you drawing and using physical media or are you drawing using it like a tablet?

Well, it depends on what I'm doing because I like to draw my characters and whatever I like to draw in sketchbooks. But my coloring skills are really bad, so I like to do that digitally. 

Yeah, It depends. If I run out of notebooks or things to draw on, I usually use my tablet because I have the pencil that kind of makes it a little bit easier. But if you keep tilting it, that makes it become a lot harder. So then I just find random pieces around the house and then I start drawing on it. 

I think that drawing on paper I excel in because I'm able to get more detail into my pictures, clearly erase things better, and really experiment with how I draw things.


Personally, I draw with a pencil and paper. One of the reasons I don't draw digitally is because all I have is a phone and a finger, which is not the best equipment, so yeah. Plus I just like it better with a pencil.

So based on the process that Arreem laid out for traditional publication versus self publication, if you were to create a book, which do you think that you would go with?

I would personally think that I would excel in writing down stories instead of drawing them since I like people to be more immersive and stories and really think out the settings and themes instead of just looking at a picture because it makes them think and expands their storytelling skills. 

I think if I was publishing a book I made, I would do it traditionally because I procrastinate a lot. Like you said, it's kind of like a business when you self-publish a book, so I don't think I would be able to put the time into doing that. 

You need somebody else to give you that deadline?

Yeah.

When it comes to trying to write a story, I eventually never finish because I write something, I kind of get an idea of trying to write a book, but ten seconds later get bored and then I never finish it.

All right. Any final reflections on Don't Cause Trouble? 

I really like the book, and I feel like one thing we didn't really get to talk about was the way he was treated because of his race. I mean, Asian, you know, and him going to a school that was predominantly white or just like different races. That's probably why he felt like out of place, especially when they put him in the class for speaking English, and it was his first language. It's just how people treated him because of how he looked. 

Yeah, he shared a lot with us about being the child of immigrants, his second hand clothing, how hard his parents worked, and being automatically put in the ESL class. He called this a coming of age book, and I think that's a particular experience of coming of age that not a lot of maybe mainstream readers in the US understand. Thank you for bringing that up. 

One thing that I could understand is he looks different but when they put him in the ESL he was surprised because English was his first language, but he never spoke Chinese. But even though he looked different doesn't mean that he could know a different language for his first language other than his traditional language that was supposed to be his first. 

Yeah, that was frustrating. 

I really enjoyed this book, There is a lot of funny parts in this. And actually, there was one specific scene where the mom was working and she was cleaning and stuff and then he finds out that there's this man who comes up to the mom and he starts telling her a lot of curse words and being mean, you know. It hasn't happened to me, but there was this one time where my mom actually defended my grandma, and from what she explained to me, it was very powerful because there was like a sense of feeling that the people behind them didn't know that my mom spoke English, and she told the person behind them "I can speak Spanish and English whenever I want" because the people in the back were telling her they need to start speaking more English because they're in our land. So I felt like this really connected a lot to the book. 

I would recommend this book to people who feel like they don't fit in with the new cultures, and people who think they don't belong in other places of other races, because they do. We're all human beings and we should all be treated the same. 

I would recommend this book to my mom's classroom because she has a lot of students from different countries. She said that she has some from India and a lot of Middle Eastern countries. So I would recommend in there because there's this kind of I feel like this might be able to connect to them.

I would recommend this book to the whole world because you never know who could be moving to a different place whenever. 

I'd like to thank Arree Chung for meeting with us today. I feel like in the 15 minutes that we have for this podcast we maybe barely scratched the surface of the things that we learned from him and from this book and thinking about this book and at the theme, So thank you Arree. 

I'd like to thank Narges Zandi, our lit discussant, Vianey Torres, our administrative person who keeps us all together, Alexis Mendoza, our fantastic sound engineer, Melanie Reyes, who is helping us with our book talks and our social media, The University of Arizona College of Education tech team who is helping us with some extra training right now. 

We are recording in the Digital Innovation and Learning Lab in the University of Arizona College of Education.