I wrote eighteen drafts of my first, real, live, going to finish this sucker if it kills me, novel without ever knowing what my protagonist should look like.

Eventually, I chickened out and drafts nineteen and twenty starred a generic white dude. Except that I didn’t know any. My dad is the closest white person I know well. He’s Cajun and Irish in that grandma immigrated from Ireland as a little girl, and I was called pistach by beloved old people until my twenties*. That upbringing, as a son of a first-generation immigrant and a lower class man who built his own tree cutting business by the skin of his teeth, shaped the man I love and fought with and fought for as an angry teenager.

None of that appeared in my story, because my main character existed no further than the period at the end of the sentence on the page.

Eventually I asked myself about me.

My dad was a big contributor to my upbringing, but so was my mom. She had an immensely different upbringing than I did, as a first generation immigrant from Japan who spent the rest of her formative years in the mining country of northern California.

I didn’t know the words for myself until later in life (hapa, nissei, mixed). It wasn’t until I left the cocoon of home that I understood how alone I was in the world. I had never, at that time, seen myself in a book as a main character.

So I made my protagonist hapa.

Suddenly he gained a history, and I became fascinated by the histories of the people around him. Everyone came to the same small town for a deviously similar reason, many of them from other countries and realms. The how and why of his problem solving motive took notes from my grandmother’s Methodist faith. His parents came into focus. His mother took center stage as a reformed villain, his father turned into a foil for the secondary antagonist. They lived, they breathed. And I got closer to an actual novel.