Thi Bui: Hi, this is Thi Bui. And I'm the illustrator of "A Different Pond". I'm going to tell a little bit about how I came to create this book and then I'll share a page spread with you.

I was very lucky to get to illustrate this story of someone who is the same age as me and came from the same country and history as me. To do research for it I did get a lot of photographs of Bao Phi, the author's family photos, and he also went and did some topography of like ponds that kind of reminded him of what he remembered as a child. But they were very helpful for me because I don't live in Minneapolis but for other parts of the book I could actually rely on my own family history and understanding of the shared culture that Bao and I both come from.

So for the spread for the very end of the book where the little boy and his father has come home again and on the next page the little boy's asleep and dreaming of a different pond. That is very much pulled from my own family memories of sitting around the dinner table with a big family. Bao and I both came from big families but I remember pulling up chairs from different parts of the house. We never had a matching set of anything. Eating with chopsticks, the Vietnamese meal always consisting of a pot of steamed rice plus some kind of meat in rare case the fish that they had caught. Dipping sauces, a little bit of vegetables on the side, and a clear soup which the mom is spooning. These are all things that I knew about from growing up myself in a Vietnamese household so I spent a lot of tender love and care into the little details that I knew from having grown up with them for so long.

And the little things like, if you notice there's a spoon sitting on top of the rice cooker, that's because you know you want to keep the rice warm so there's no where else to put the spoons so it's balanced on top. Also like how you hold your chopsticks and what you do with them when you're not holding them are very specific things. They're not really like things that are formally taught to you, you just get to know them from doing them and I wanted to share a little bit of that with readers who might be familiar with it or who might not be familiar with it.

So the reason for the framing of that picture of the family is that it reminds me of a lot of my old family photographs but they're sort of small the colors faded, and the corners are rounded that's a lot of my family photos from the late 70s and early 80s look like. But we were barely ever photographed in such a candid way. Usually we posed for the photographs, everybody looking forward at the camera and I wanted to capture a little bit of the moments that we remember in our heads that maybe we didn't capture on film.