Ernabel Demillo: The New York Times called her novel
"a daring debut."
I met up recently with Daphne Palasi Andreades, whose book
Brown Girls
girls who grew up there.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: Yay! Yu and Me.
I love it.
Ernabel Demillo: We met on a brisque late winter day at Yu
and Me, the new bookstore in Chinatown filled with books
by authors Daphne Palasi Andreades have long admired.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: It's a bookstore that's filled
with books by people of color and by immigrants and
other marginalized groups.
Ernabel Demillo: And it's where you'll find her
new debut novel
Andreades is a proud Brown girl from Queens.
Her book is inspired by her own immigrant upbringing.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: If you really want to know,
we are the color of 7-Eleven root beer,
the color of sand at Rockaway Beach when it blisters
the bottoms of our feet.
Ernabel Demillo: It's a coming of age story told through the
collective we of Brown girls.
Chinese, Haitian, Dominican, Filipino, Bangladeshi,
Panamanian, and more.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: Color of soil.
Color of the charcoal pencils our sisters
used to rim their eyes.
Color of grilled hamburger patties.
In writing the we, I was really, really interested
in capturing this chorus of women's voices.
Again, women of color across different diasporas, because
that was my experience growing up in Queens.
Ernabel Demillo: Andreades was born and raised in Queens.
Her parents immigrated there in the 1990s
from the Philippines.
She majored in English and psychology at Baruch
and was a Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence
Program fellow.
In her book she thanks her two Baruch professors
for introducing her to poetry, building the
foundation she would use in her later writings.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: I studied poetry before turning
to fiction at CUNY actually.
And I had two really incredible professors there
who are poets and academics.
The first is Grace Schulman and the second is Eli Shipley.
They were just incredibly formative
to writing
And thinking about those lessons in poetry of
really, really focusing on sensory details, being as
concrete as possible in my writing and in my language.
Brown Girls.
We live in the drags of Queens, New York,
where airplanes fly so low that we are certain
they will crush us.
Ernabel Demillo: But the spark that inspired her novel came
later while she was a second year MFA student at Columbia.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: One of my mentors,
Elissa Schappell, said this incredible quote in class one
day, that just kind of sparked my imagination, I think.
And she quoted Toni Morrison.
And the Toni Morrison quote was “if there is a book that
you want to read, but it has not been written yet, then
you must be the one to write it.” And I went home that
day and I thought, what is the book that I desperately
want to read but I feel has not been represented?
What am I hungry to read?
Ernabel Demillo: And the Brown girls and their stories came
pouring out of her fingers.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: I started writing into the
story of immigrant children, women of color, just a story
that completely centered them and celebrated them in all
their beauty and complexity.
Ernabel Demillo: The book not only celebrates Brown
girls like her, but also is a love letter to Queens,
one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: I really did want to make
people feel, or conjure this feeling of totally entering
into this incredibly unique, vibrant, eclectic world.
So it was essential for me to try and capture the
different languages, the different cultures and
communities living side by side, people and immigrants
from all different diasporas.
That was really key and important to me to
represent in Queens.
Ernabel Demillo: Her novel was published just four
days into 2022 and the glowing reviews poured in.
The New York Times called it “daring.” The book
made must read lists.
Andreades soon found herself booked, no pun intended, at
book signings and readings in the US and around the world.
It has been a whirlwind few months for this Brown girl,
this daughter of immigrants, who dared to dream big.
Daphne Palasi Andreades: I feel like pursuing this path
was more than my parents could have envisioned and more
than I thought for myself.
And there's something about being able to dream big.
Ernabel Demillo: For Asian American Life,
I'm Ernabel Demillo.