Mượn Thị Văn: Hello. My name is Mượn Thị Văn and I am the author of Wishes. This book is illustrated by the Victo Ngai.

The story of Wishes is inspired by actual events in my life, and it's a story that I've always wanted to tell. I wrote it four years ago, but it's been in my heart for a very long time.

When I was born in the early 1980s in Southern Vietnam, my family was already in hiding. They were hiding so that my father wouldn't be captured by the newly installed Vietnamese government. There had just been a very long civil war. My father has served on the losing side of the war, so the new government essentially wanted to punish everyone who had fought against them.

Less than a year after I was born, my family made our way back to our village in the central coast. This is a village that my family on both sides have lived for many generations. While we were there, my mother and her family started planning for a secret escape to Hong Kong. It had to be done in secret because the government was not letting people just leave freely. We had to escape in the middle of the night. We packed what we could carry. We left with other close family members. We had to leave behind my grandfather because he was already very old and he didn't want to try starting again somewhere else, somewhere where he didn't know.

On the night that we left, the water patrol was firing at people to deter them from escaping. That actually did deter one of my aunts and her family from leaving with us. They actually had the route, a simple map of how we were supposed to travel, and so then we had to scramble to find another one.

We spent a few weeks at sea. We don't know exactly how long we were out at sea, but based on my interviews with my mom and one of my uncles, we're estimating that it was probably around two weeks, maybe three. Some of my relatives that took the same route at the same time took a couple of months, just based on weather conditions and what happened to them at sea. We were fortunate just because no one died when we were traveling. Unfortunately, that was not the case for all my relatives on other voyages.

When I came to the US when I was almost two, I grew up in a community of refugees, and we were related by blood and by marriage. This story is not a unique one. This is a story that is repeated every day around the world. Although the story is a difficult one, in Wishes, we try to tell it in an approachable way for all readers. I hope this book will remind every reader of our common humanity. I hope that it will open the reader's heart, especially for a young reader, because a young reader's heart is still so full of love and generosity. I hope readers recognize that Wishes is a slice of a much larger story.

Now I'd like to read aloud from Wishes.

The bag wished it was deeper. The light wished it was brighter. The dream wished it was longer. The clock wished it was slower. The path wished it was shorter. The boat wished it was bigger.