Description-

• “The little girl I was would have been thrilled to encounter Meilan... having found a character who embraces the complexity of being both Chinese and American, I would have been able to echo her words: 'I am not alone.'” 
  —New York Times Book Review by Jean Kwok
   
  A family feud before the start of seventh grade propels Meilan from Boston's Chinatown to rural Ohio, where she must tap into her inner strength and sense of justice to make a new place for herself in this resonant debut.
  Meilan Hua's world is made up of a few key ingredients: her family's beloved matriarch, Nai Nai; the bakery her parents, aunts, and uncles own and run in Boston's Chinatown; and her favorite Chinese fairy tales.
  After Nai Nai passes, the family has a falling-out that sends Meilan, her parents, and her grieving grandfather on the road in search of a new home. They take a winding path across the country before landing in Redbud, Ohio. Everything in Redbud is the opposite of Chinatown, and Meilan's not quite sure who she is—being renamed at school only makes it worse. She decides she is many Meilans, each inspired by a different Chinese character with the same pronunciation as her name. Sometimes she is Mist, cooling and invisible; other times, she's Basket, carrying her parents' hopes and dreams and her guilt of not living up to them; and occasionally she is bright Blue, the way she feels around her new friend Logan. Meilan keeps her facets separate until an injustice at school shows her the power of bringing her many selves together.
  The Many Meanings of Meilan, written in stunning prose by Newbery Honor-winning author Andrea Wang, is an exploration of all the things it's possible to grieve, the injustices large and small that make us rage, and the peace that's unlocked when we learn to find home within ourselves.

Excerpts-

• From the cover

  Chapter Six

  For the next month, we are like the Hakka—­the guest people of China that Māma told me about, who migrated from place to place. I discover that my parents have more friends scattered across the entire eastern United States than I ever knew about.

  After we leave Niagara Falls, we visit one of Gōnggong’s old friends in New York City, where he talks as much as he did before Nǎinai died. That’s when I realize we’re not just leaving behind good memories—­maybe we are leaving bad ones behind, too.

  In New Jersey, Māma makes us tour the castle-­like brick buildings of Princeton University even though I won’t go to college for six more years. Bàba insists on stopping in Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell, which is a lot smaller than I expected.

  In Baltimore, my parents decide to splurge and have lunch at a café overlooking the harbor. “I come one crabcake, sauce on side,” Māma orders.

  “What did you say?” the waitress asks. Māma repeats her order. The waitress shakes her head, a frown crossed with a smirk on her pasty face. “Learn to speak English.”

  My parents’ cheeks are flushed, but they won’t make a scene.

  I glare at the waitress. “Our English is fine,” I say. Because it is.

  Their English isn’t “broken,” like some people claim. It’s a translation of what they would say in Mandarin, word for word. Sometimes I think English is the broken language, with all the exceptions to grammar and spelling rules, words borrowed from other languages, and messy conjugations.

  My voice catches on a lump of beetles, but I push through it. “My mother would like the crabcakes with the sauce on the side, like she said.” I order for the rest of us, too, and shut my menu with a snap. The waitress grabs our menus without a word and leaves. When the food comes, another waitress serves us.

  “It is good, Lan,” Bàba says. I don’t know if he means the crabcakes or my speaking for them. But I notice that they let me walk ahead and talk to the people in the ticket booths at the museums in Washington, DC.

  They’re both quieter, at least during the day. At night, they continue to stay up late, catching up with old friends on years’ worth of news. When their friends ask questions about our future, like what kind of work they are looking for, Bàba says, “I’m going to become the next Chinese movie star,” which makes everyone laugh, since he’s never acted in his life. Māma tells them she’s going to be a professional poker player in Las Vegas, which I think is a dig at Fourth Uncle except that she would be really good at it. I can never tell what she’s thinking. When Bàba tells them about Nǎinai’s passing and selling the bakery, that’s when Gōnggong falls silent.

  I wonder why we’ve never visited any of these people before, and then I realize the answer. The bakery. And the family. We always had the family around us. Now we don’t.

  The thought makes me yearn to call Xing, but I don’t have a cell phone anymore. One more thing lost to the squabbles about money. Neither of my parents have called any of the aunts and uncles since we left. Asking to borrow their phones to call Xing feels like a betrayal.

  Bàba zigzags across one state after another, chasing the setting sun. We climb up into the mountains of West Virginia, the trees changing from big leafy oaks to windswept spruces, the landscape a tapestry of...

About the Author-

• Andrea Wang is the award-winning author of the picture books The Nian Monster (Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Honor), Magic Ramen (Freeman Book Award Honor), and Watercress. The Many Meanings of Meilan is her debut middle-grade novel. The first character in Andrea’s Chinese name is an archaic one that means fragrant, but her parents’ friends all thought it was the character for jade, which sounds exactly the same. That sparked her lifelong interest in names and identity. She’d much rather be a rock than smelly. Andrea likes to write about family, food, and culture. She spent her childhood in Ohio and Boston and now lives in Colorado with her family.
   

Reviews-

• 

  August 23, 2021
  A few months before the novel begins, the death of beloved Huā family matriarch Nǎinai sends the fate of Taiwanese American family bakery Golden Phoenix into a tailspin in this carefully woven middle grade debut by Wang (Watercress). After Huā Měilán, 12, tells her cousin a bedtime story that instigates a family feud over finances, her father and his siblings sell the Boston Chinatown–based bakery. Měilán, her parents, and her widowed grandfather subsequently embark on an East Coast road trip ending in rural Rosebud, Ohio. Mourning the fracturing of her family, Lan—rechristened Melanie by her new middle school principal—swears off storytelling as she struggles to acclimate into an unfamiliar all-white environment and navigate her identity within her family and the world. Denoted in Pinyin, Mandarin dialogue and Chinese proverbs pepper the narrative, along with folkloric elements and allusions; Měilán’s compartmentalization is cleverly rendered in different readings of her name. The book can feel slightly overstuffed at times, but Lan’s encounters with microaggressions and racism are all too real in this gently fantastical tale. Back matter includes an author’s note on transliteration, a glossary of Mama’s proverbs, and additional resources. Ages 9–12. Agent: Erin Murphy, Erin Murphy Literary.

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