Thao Lam – “There is an audience for all kinds of stories”
The Vietnamese-Canadian illustrator and author of children’s books spoke about her family’s refugee past, assimilating into Canadian culture, ants, and why there’s nothing wrong with being angry
The Paper Boat: A Refugee Story was based on your own family’s journey from Vietnam to Canada. You were two years old when you migrated. How did ants, of all creatures, find their way into this story?

Yes, this book is about my family’s migration story across the South China Sea. I took the direction of talking about the ants because that is the most personal piece of the story. As a child, whenever I asked my mum about the war, she told me this story about how she used to rescue ants from sugar bowls when she was little. These ants came back to reciprocate her kindness when we were fleeing the country. It was dark at night, so she got lost in the tall grass. By the moonlight, she saw a trail of ants and followed them. They led her and all of us to safety. They took us to the riverbed where the escape boat was waiting.
Books about refugees are often about persecution, loss, assimilation into a new culture, or fighting for social justice. What made you focus on karma instead?
That comes from what my mum chose to remember amidst all the death and destruction. Over 1.6 million refugees escaped Vietnam. With her Buddhist belief system, she took this in and decided to stay optimistic. She believed that her good actions were rewarded.
While conducting research, I got to interact with a lot of people who escaped from Vietnam on boats. Some of the survivors mentioned that they saw a goddess in the waters waiting for them with a lotus flower in her hand, and she took them safely across.
Could you tell us more about this tradition of sugar bowls for ants?
Basically, people used to put sugar in a bowl and fill it up with water. Ants like sweet stuff, so they crawled into the bowl to drink the sweet water. But then could not get out of it because the bowl was so big. People used this idea to get rid of ants in the house.
Many families, like ours, had to downsize and adopt a new lifestyle because they lost so much during the war. The houses were shacks. It was hard to keep the floors clean and it was common to find ants. My mother liked helping the ants, so she saved them from drowning.
What was it like to grow up in a Vietnamese family in Canada?
My dad would talk to us only in English but my mum, on the other hand, would talk to us in Vietnamese. They worked all the time but they made sure that we celebrated all the Canadian holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving. My sister and I would learn Canadian cultural stuff at school, and be so excited about Easter. We are three years apart. She knows nothing about Vietnam. She is as Canadian as Canadian can be. She has a Canadian name.
I feel like I am our family’s last tie to Vietnam. My daughter was born in Canada. It is difficult for me to pass on information about Vietnamese culture to her. I do not know all that much about Vietnamese culture because I too was a child when we migrated. As you grow older and understand your parents better, you appreciate your culture and feel the need to pass it on. Maybe we should both learn Vietnamese together. She is 10 years old. Language learning is easier when you are younger. Anyway, I feel like I am failing as a parent.

Don’t all parents feel like that?
I mean, yes, that’s true too. Retaining your culture is really important. Getting a Christian name to adapt to north American culture makes people feel a part of the group. But there is a price to pay. You slowly kill a little bit of your culture. Languages are disappearing really fast. Everybody wants to learn English. We do not realise what we are doing until it is really late. That’s why I feel so strongly about teaching my daughter Vietnamese.
Would you describe the process of writing this book as therapeutic?
Absolutely! Interviewing my family, reading up on the history of Vietnam, watching documentaries — all of it was deeply enriching for me. I was able to understand things that my parents were not too comfortable talking about. I did some research on ants too because I wanted to understand what those creatures are like. They are tiny, so we tend to overlook them. Slowly, I began making connections between refugees and ants. Both are so resilient, constantly adapting and working together, contributing to their local environments.
Another aspect that I want to highlight is how important representation has become in the publishing industry. People are telling their own stories, unlike the 1980s and the 1990s. The books that are coming out are solidly researched, and have a strong element of authenticity.
As an illustrator, I love collage. It is quite therapeutic. You get to make something with your own hands. It is different from drawing and painting. It is like an immersive craft project.
Let us not forget though that publishing is a business. Profits play a huge role in determining what is published. There is an audience for all kinds of stories. Teachers and librarians look for what we call “own voices” books. But I also notice that this results in checking boxes, and overcompensating at times. This can be a slippery slope. The quality of books matters.
The book got a new lease of life with its adaptation into an animation film called Boat People (2023). What was it like to retell the story in collaboration with Canadian director Kjell Boersma, and work with the National Film Board of Canada?
The concept is similar. We are still talking about my family situation and the ants. But the film has narration in it, which makes it quite different from a wordless picture book. Our target audience for the film is 18 to 35. It is only 10-minutes long. Children can come watch and understand it but there are more layers in the story for adults to unravel. I enjoyed exploring how the same story could be told in a different way. It has been received well.
Your picture book Line in the Sand (2022) made me think of borders and how they keep people out. Was it informed by your family’s experience of living in a Malaysian refugee camp for five months before you eventually migrated to Canada?
That was definitely a part of the conversation that I had with my editor. But I wanted to write what was primarily a story about misunderstandings. When Donald Trump was the US President between 2017 and 2021, there was a lot of talk about refugees and shutting them out. Whatever happens in the US becomes a topic of interest in Canada. That got me wondering about how to discuss boundaries and misunderstandings. I wanted people to be open. I am very grateful that Canada opened its borders to Vietnamese people, and that my family could come over. It is important to recognize that people do not migrate out of choice. They are forced to. When people want a place to be safe, my instinct is to welcome them.
One of the ways to make people feel welcome is to spell and pronounce their name in the way it is meant to be. Your book Thao (2021) unpacks how identity is so closely associated with the name one is assigned. How have children responded to it?
Let me answer with a story. When I did a book reading in San Francisco, there were a lot of Asian kids. I wanted to know their names. When someone said “My name is Mary”, I asked, “What do they call you at home?” Kids love to talk about this. I remember reading a news report about children in Brooklyn who were fed up with teachers calling them names that were made up just because they did not want to make the effort to learn unfamiliar ones. These children invited teachers to have lunch with them and taught the teachers their names.
On a lighter note, I have drawn my daughter’s hand on one of the pages. When the book came out, she would tell her friends, “Let me show you the most important page. Look there’s my hand. Would you like me to autograph it for you?” All my books are like love letters to her. When I die, she will have all these books to remember her mum by.
The child in Thao wishes her name was Karen. What made you think of this?
Before getting Canadian citizenship, we got an option to change names. My mother said I could pick any. I said, “I love strawberries and my favourite colour is yellow.” I was too young to make a decision, so my parents didn’t change my name. “Thao” means loyal and obedient, which I am, but grudgingly. I work off of anger. That pushes me to drive change.
When American feminist writer bell hooks met her Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh for the first time, he told her, “Hold on to your anger and use it as compost for your garden”. Have you heard this story? How does it speak to you?
Wow, that’s beautiful! And it totally makes sense. There is nothing wrong with being angry. It means that you feel something. You are not just sitting there and saying this is somebody else’s problem. Protests and marches, fuelled by anger. Anger can be productive.
In the book, Thao, you show how food can become an entry point to learn about another culture. But aren’t immigrant children often bullied for the supposedly strange-smelling food they bring to school?
My dad loved cooking. To learn about another culture, we would have a whole week of food from that culture. When you taste the products of another culture, you get to know more about their history. I think that, if people at the United Nations sat and had a meal together, things would be better. When your mouth is stuffed, you cannot say mean things.
When my parents came to Canada, there wasn’t much Vietnamese food available. The government gave a cheque every month to subsidize. They bought the cheapest things like sliced bread, apples and processed cheese. Our lunch was very basic. When we had more time and money, we started making Vietnamese food. Ingredients had to be imported. My sister used to be embarrassed about her lunch. She used to throw away her food at school.
Right now, in Toronto, we have so many different restaurants from different countries. People line up so that they can say they had a different experience. It is something posh that you can flaunt. By the way, I love Indian food. I go like, “Oh my God, this burn on my tongue is great.” The Indian restaurants in Canada tend to tone down spices for the Canadian market. Seeing and experiencing India outside of a travel or food show is a thousand times better.
Tell us about your upcoming book Everybelly.
I have always been conscious about my body because my mum raised me that way. When my daughter was born, I made a mental note to never make a comment about weight and fat. Sometime back, I started researching how kids develop a body image and how it affects them. When my daughter was four, she came out of the shower, grabbed her thigh and said: “Is this fat?” I wondered where she was picking that from. At seven, when she got her first sparkling dress, I asked her to pose for a picture. She said, “Let me stand like this so you don’t see my stomach”. I realised that someone had made her feel uncomfortable. I wanted to go and punch them. The anger that I was feeling in that moment led me to work on this book.
Chintan Girish Modi is a Mumbai-based journalist who writes about books, art and culture. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.