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My first publication was a haiku in a children's magazine when I was 9 years old. I received one dollar for it! I gave the check to my dad for Christmas, and he framed it and hung it over his desk.

With a book called 'Keeping Score,' I really did want to write a book about the Korean War, because I felt that it is the least understood war in the American cultural imagination. So I set out with the idea that Americans didn't know much about the Korean War and that I was going to try to fix a tiny bit of that.

I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it's much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!

A mistake made with good in your heart is still a mistake, but it is one for which you must forgive yourself.

In my family and among Korean-Americans, there just is no occasion that people would get together without bibimbap. It's something that people eat when they're wanting to celebrate or have a good time with friends.

Each of my books has taken me a different length of time to write - eight months for Seesaw Girl, eight months for Shard, three years for When My Name Was Keoko! The publisher takes another year and a half to work on the book, so altogether each book can take up to three or four years to publish.