Saadia Faruqi, A THOUSAND QUESTIONS

[1:46]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy called Moms Don't Have A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen vaccine research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. If all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. I am so excited to be partnering with the Washington Post's Kids Post Summer Book Club. I'll be interviewing two of their eight authors for the eight books that they picked about friendship. And if you and your children have not signed up for this club, they target mostly ages eight to 14, but you can older and younger are welcome too. There are eight books on friendship this summer that they picked, and that were already in the hardcover paper, you can search for it online at kids posts. And at the end of the summer, your kid can have their name in the newspaper, and you get a free gift. And it's really awesome and it's a great way to encourage summer reading, especially doing so with friends. So get your child to sign up, have your friend grab a friend so that they can both do this friendship book club together. And this is the first one. My daughter and I actually listened to this together in a couple car rides on audiobook, which was great. I recommend doing the same. It's by Saadia Farooqi, and it's called A Thousand Questions. Saadia is a Pakistani American author, essayist, and interfaith activist. She writes the children's early reader series Yasmin and other books for children, including middle grade novels A Place at the Table co written with Laura Chauvin and A Thousand Questions. Sadiya is editor in chief of Blue Minaret, a magazine for Muslim art, poetry and prose and was featured in Oprah Magazine in 2017 as a woman making a difference in her community. She lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and children. Welcome, Sadiya. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss a thousand questions.

[3:52]Saadia Faruqi: Thank you for inviting me. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

[3:56]Zibby Owens: And I'm so excited to do this in particular because it's part of the Washington Post Kids Post Book Club. And I'm thrilled to be supporting that. I saw a huge write up of it in the Washington Post one day, and I was like, This is amazing. I have to get my daughter who's sitting right next to me to do this. And she picked two of the eight books and said, These are the two I want to read. And one of them was yours. And that's why we're here today. Well, I'm honored. Thank you so much. I'm very

[4:21]Saadia Faruqi: honored and grateful for that opportunity with Washington Post because it means that more kids can get to learn about a different culture and a different country and, you know, hopefully find out that we're not all that different. Yeah.

[4:34]Zibby Owens: It doesn't matter what we wear or anyhow we look. It's the same issues, these same girls playing in the courtyard and dealing with

[4:43]Saadia Faruqi: poop emojis and whatever else in Oh the my gosh. Yes, all the poop emojis that are in my book. So So,

[4:51]Zibby Owens: Zadias, why don't you tell us what your book is about and what inspired you to write it?

[4:57]Saadia Faruqi: Sure. So A Thousand Questions is a middle grade novel, although kids and adults of any age can read it and I hope get entertainment and benefit out of it. It's a friendship story, basically. It's a story of two girls. Mimi is an American girl who is visiting Pakistan for the first time for summer vacation to meet her grandparents. She's never met them before. Her mom's from there and so she's been dragged for summer to spend time in this big mansion. And she hates it. It's too hot for her. The food is too spicy. She doesn't know the language. She just wants to go home. And there she meets Sakina. Sakina is the other main character. Sakina is the servant in her grandparents' house. And Sakina is kind of irritated by this rich American spoiled girl who now she has to serve and kind of like be her companion because there are only two kids in this big mansion and nobody wants to deal with them. Everyone's got their own issues and dramas going on. But the more time they spend together, they kind of have to in the beginning, but they realize that they're not as different as they had thought. And they both have these impossible dreams that kind of are hard for them as kids, 11 year olds, to even wrap their heads around. Mimi is looking for her dad who left them when she was little. And Sakina wants to stop working at a rich person's house and go to school, But she doesn't know enough English to pass the test to go to school there. So they decide to help each other and hopefully achieve some part of their seemingly impossible dreams. And they become friends in the process. There's a lot of other stuff going on. But it's basically, like I said, a friendship story that I think will resonate with a lot of readers. Absolutely.

[6:46]Zibby Owens: I have to say I found it pretty heartbreaking the way that what is the main character who came from America? What is her name again? Mimi. Mimi. Of course. Mimi. That's what we call my mother. Yeah. So the way that Mimi writes letters to her father and is always sort of reliving the experience through his eyes, writing what everything is like, sort of updating him, this constant need for approval and attention that she just sort of sends out with hopes into the ether, if you will. Tell me a little bit about that and sort of this need for

[7:18]Saadia Faruqi: love from all sorts of places. Even though the mom was like good riddance to bad rubbish and all of that about the dad. Right, right. That's where the title of the book comes from. So Mimi is the kind of girl who always has a lot of questions, like most kids do, probably. But her problem is that there's nobody willing to answer any of our questions. She has so many questions about her father, why he left, what he's like, where is he, what is he doing, does he miss her? And her mom's not interested. Nobody around her wants to answer these questions. So she starts writing in this journal. And she's never meant for anyone to see that journal. It's just her way of processing these difficult feelings that she has. And I hope that a lot of our readers, my readers, and your listeners will kind of also see writing as therapeutic because I certainly do. You know, it can be a way to process your feelings, she does. And you know, yeah, we're all looking for love. We're all looking for answers to questions that we all have in our minds. It's not always possible to get the answers. But I think that what Mimi does is smart in a way that she kind of documents her own grief and her longing and her questions. And I don't know, I guess people should read the book to find out what happens with this journal and her questions. Does she ever get them answered or not? Dot dot dot. Question mark. I didn't realize both her and the servant were both 11. Yeah, so they're both the same age. In fact, at one point, Takina tells her father that, you know, she's my age, but she is taller than me. And he says, yeah, because she's from America and kids get more, you know, more food and more air and more better life so they're able to grow more. So it's just one of those little things that, you know, maybe you might wanna When you're listening also, the audiobook kind of will, you know, you might miss a few things. So I don't know. That's

[9:12]Zibby Owens: I don't know. We're sitting here five'two and five feet. I don't know if we didn't get enough. We didn't get enough stouted waters here in America. My father's five'five, my dad is five'ten. It's like, I could have been so tall, but I 'm not. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's her father's weight. You know, the thing with fiction is that fiction is not reality.

[9:31]Saadia Faruqi: And you can't read a book, a storybook to find out real facts, you know, what would really be, you know, height or genetics or things like that with different people. But that's the reason that Sakina's dad gives her maybe as a way of telling her not to, you know, he doesn't maybe want her worrying about how she looks. Yeah, so that's what he says to her. I always heard that growing up too. But who knows? Who knows? Diet, exercise, genes, who knows what's what with. I

[10:02]Zibby Owens: was also struck by when Mimi and her mom got to Mimi's mom's childhood home and this beautiful mansion, although falling apart a bit at seams, but that she was so dismissive of the, what she calls the servants who were there working. She wouldn't even say hello. And she just like blew right in the front door and Mimi was left to be like, aren't we supposed to say hi to this girl over here?

[10:27]Saadia Faruqi: Yeah. Servant culture is very interesting, I found, for Americans or probably all Europeans. So I guess I didn't introduce myself, but I'm originally from Pakistan. I was born there. I grew up there. I went to school and college there. And then I came to The US as an immigrant when I was 22 years old. So I kind of have like these two halves of me, you know, this part of me that's grown up in this one kind of culture that has a lot of great things, but also as you know, every culture is like that. Wherever you go, you'll see things that you don't like and things that you do like, but they make up you and your experiences. So you can't, I think even the negative things, you can't really dismiss them because they're a part of who you are as well. So in a lot of poor countries, servant culture is really important part of the economy. So there are a lot of poor people and they are employed by the richer people and that's how they survive. So it's kind of like a very interesting dynamic, you know, of that. But then a lot of times, some rich people do get, you know, snobbish and they're not really treating their servants the way they should. And I don't know, it's all very complicated, but she's, her mom is used to that, right? Like I was growing up there. So when Mimi's mother goes back, she's automatically gone back into that time, that mindset of these people, you know, a lot of times you don't even see servants if they're there throughout. But for Mimi, this is Neil, like there are people serving us and I don't have to get up to do anything. And, you know, my stuff is done for me. So yeah, that's one of the different one of the many themes in my book is classism and what poverty means in a country like America versus a country like Pakistan. They're not the same thing, you know. Saying somebody's poor here is very different from

[12:18]Zibby Owens: what it means to say someone's poor over there. So let's say there are two kids who just read your book, who live here in America and didn't know much about Pakistan to begin with and just finished reading your book. What is what are some of the things they should know the most? Like what might not have gotten in the book? Like what's the behind the scenes inside scoop for kids who now are have this newfound interest in a culture they weren't as familiar with before? Well, first of all, I tried to be very comprehensive.

[12:47]Saadia Faruqi: I tried to learn as much as possible. There are a lot of different themes. If you read the book, you'll see there's a whole there's an election going on in the background, right? So, there's so much about there's talk about democracy. There's talk about what corruption means. There's this not only a kid's book, really don't think so. I mean, I don't know, Tibby, if you enjoyed it or not, but it's Of course I did. I wrote it to address, like I wanted it to be something that adults could also, you know, enjoy and maybe get something out of and kids as well. But I think that if kids are listening or reading this book, they should get a pretty good overview of a lot of different things. But it's not possible to get everything in one book. And that's why I always encourage people to read multiple books from different cultures so that you can get different perspectives. This was my perspective, right? This was the story from my experiences, my lens. I grew up in Pakistan. I wasn't rich, but I wasn't as foreign as Sakina. So I kind of like in that background where I knew a lot of what Sakina felt in terms of just being angry at the way things were and why were some people rich and why couldn't I have what other people had? And I wish I could go to America, but all those kinds of feelings. But then I also wasn't working. I was in school. So thankfully I didn't have that much of a negative experience. But when you read different books, like read my book, then read another book, read maybe nonfiction as well. And then you'll get more of a rounded view of Pakistan. Just don't read negative news articles because I think that that's what happened. One of the reasons I wrote this book and one of the reasons I write books in general for kids and adults is that I don't want people to read headlines of newspapers when something bad happens and things this big. This is the only thing about this country that's worth knowing. That's literally the least important thing worth knowing which comes on, I don't know, CNN or Fox when something bad happens. So stories can be a really good bridge between those two gaps.

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[16:59]Zibby Owens: And is that why you started your publication?

[17:01]Saadia Faruqi: I did. So I started my first ever book was a short story collection set in Pakistan for grown ups actually. And I wasn't writing for kids originally. It was all adult fiction and nonfiction. And I used to do a lot of it. I still do a lot of interfaith work, which means that I would go out to different communities and groups and talk about similarities and faith and culture and things like that as a way of bringing people closer together. And I realized that so many people often had the same questions when they would find out I was an immigrant, when they found out that I was from Pakistan, they would still keep asking me the same kind of sometimes stereotypical questions, sometimes weird questions, but they're all in people's minds, right? And you can dismiss people's questions like the whole title of my book is, just because you don't think it's a good question. So after several years of doing like speeches and presentations and just going over the same thing again and again, I decided why did I write a book, which is a story, but it'll bring across a lot of things. So that's what got me on this path. With children's books, I wanted my kids to kind of see themselves in books. My kids didn't, were growing up here, they're first generation. And they didn't find any books that were about kids themselves, like themselves. And so I decided, okay, well, I'm a writer. So why not write kids books too to bring across that kind of

[18:22]Zibby Owens: help them and other kids like them? Perfect. Well, as I mentioned earlier, maybe before we were recording, my daughter and I listened on one pair of headphones split between the two of us sitting side by side. Do you have any questions? My daughter's 14 and we just listened to the audiobook. Who was your favorite character?

[18:44]Saadia Faruqi: A lot of, you know, it's interesting because I have readers who are from South Asian background and they all hated Mimi. They were like, she's so spoilt and she's so rude and she's so pissed. And it was funny because a lot of my other readers love her. So it's, you know, everyone's going to love different characters. That's funny. Okay. I

[19:08]Saadia Faruqi: She's I put a lot of me in her, not necessarily experience wise, but I'm creative. Obviously, I write. And it's a profession that's not really kind of considered a good profession or obviously doesn't earn a lot of money. And so in Pakistan and a lot of South Asian cultures, if you're not a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer or somebody making lots of money, you're like a failure. So I was like, okay, maybe this ma is gonna be a failure. And she'll she'll, you know, so you do kind of put your characters in all kinds of difficult positions.

[20:02]Saadia Faruqi: What she's trying to say is, every one of us, most people in this country are from somewhere else originally, right? I'm just from somewhere else myself. But when you talk to my kids, they'll be like, no, we're from here. My parents are from somewhere else. And for other people, it's their grandparents or their great, great, great, great grandparents. And I love that. I love that about America where we can bring our different cultures and experiences together in one place and then kind of meld it into something else that's beautiful. But it also comes with a lot of challenges. And you may not face those challenges because you've been here many generations, but people who've come newly to another country wherever they go, those are very unique challenges. Some of my other books talk about those as well. You know, what it means to not really fit in because even though you're from here, you look different. Or people look at your parents and they think, okay, you must be like them too. And it's just, it's hard. And so I like to put that in my books and kind of explore that so that my readers can think about it. And how about the process of writing? How long does it usually take you to write these books? And do you outline the whole thing first? Or what's your process like? Do you come up with your characters and your plots and all of that? Yeah, I'm a very fast writer. I know a lot of authors who are constantly like, Oh my gosh, how do you do it? I think I just I get very obsessed with writing, which is, I don't know, good or bad, whatever. But I like writing and I have a lot of ideas. So I'm usually writing multiple books at the same time. And I also often have multiple books coming out every year. So next year, think I'll have like seven or eight books coming out. I have like an early reader series that comes out every year. Have my middle grade novels. And so because I do that, I'm writing multiple books. It's important for me to outline really carefully and have it all down in my mind and on paper before I start. Otherwise, I get totally mixed up. So, you know, that would be bad. So yes, I write. I do a lot of outlining very, very specific. So, you know, I'll have summary of the entire book completely done before I start writing. I know exactly what's going to happen. And then I do chapter summaries. So every chapter I summarize and then I write it. I mean, it changes. Obviously, it's not going to be completely set in stone in the outline stage. But I really recommend if you're a writer that and oftentimes we write with a great idea, and then in the middle we're stuck because we didn't really think it through what was going to happen. So I recommend plotting and just having all the characters really defined and their qualities and everything so that you know what you're doing. I don't know. It works for me. I don't think it works for every writer.

[22:41]Zibby Owens: I know you said you have like seven or eight coming out every year. What upcoming

[22:46]Saadia Faruqi: book are you most excited to release? Oh my gosh. Glad you asked. So this is my new I don't know if you've seen it. No. So this is my new middle grade novel. It's called Yusuf Azimas Not a Hero. And it is it's a nineeleven book. So we know that the twentieth anniversary of nineeleven is later year. This is a story about a boy, Youssef, who is living in a small Texas town, and is getting ready to really over the top celebrate, not celebrate, but commemorate the twentieth anniversary of nineeleven. And there's a lot of like things happening, bullying, not just of kids, but of adults as well, and vandalism. And the town is kind of like on its is not doing well because of this event that's coming up that's kind of like making everyone upset and unhappy with memories and feelings and things like that. And he finds a journal of his uncle who was a kid at the time of nineeleven. So it's like a back and forth between two time periods where there's Yusuf's story going on. There's a robotics competition. He wants to win, and then other people are kind of like not happy with him or his community. But he's also reading his uncle's journal and realizing that even though twenty years have passed, a lot of things are still the same. And he has to figure out a way to stand up for himself and his community and maybe heal a little bit of the wounds that we see all around our nation for the past twenty years. So I'm nervous because it's a very important but deep and, I don't know, heavy topic. But I want kids like, you know, your kids and my kids to know about this, which they don't care because it happened before they were born. But it's something that we need to kind of talk more about and move forward as a nation with.

[24:31]Saadia Faruqi: You know, if parents talk about things, and if they hear things at school, it's easier to grasp it and understand it. But a lot of times people, and we don't realize, so it's been twenty years and my community, the Muslim American community has been like deeply affected for the past twenty years because of laws, because of regulations, because of things that have been done politically, because of the wars that have been going on outside of this country that affect our friends or our relatives. Those are things that kind of it's hard to move forward from. I interviewed like countless people who were kids, you know, at that time, and then I put a lot of that my book as well. So it's good to talk about it. But then when you hear about people who have negative reactions, we have to talk about them with them too. And that's the hard part, to bring people to the table who don't want to be there or who want to have not the nicest things to think about when you're concerned.

[25:27]Zibby Owens: That's true. Were you about to say something? No. Okay. Well, I know you had known someone something. That's why we know more about it than Yeah. He's my friend. No. I lost my best friend on 09/11. And so I told my kids We about watched remember

[25:44]Saadia Faruqi: if you have a personal connection, it's I think that it's important. It might not be easy to talk about it, but it's something that you know, one feels that is necessary to discuss with kids. But most of the kids are not like that. You know, if you have friends or relatives or somebody who went through something on nineeleven, you'll talk about it. But otherwise, unfortunately for a nation, it's like a wound that hasn't actually healed. And just imagine having a twenty year wound on your body that's not healed. You're not happy as a person, you know, because of that, even if you're going through irregular life, it's just bothering you and you don't know how to fix it. So this story hopefully is like a way for kids to understand some of those things. And it's a good story, I think, because there's a lot of fun in it too. It's not all sad or boring, I promise. So I'm excited about that. But keeping my fingers crossed if I don't get to So fail or what advice would you have for aspiring authors? Aspiring authors actually sit down and write something. I think that a lot of us want to write, but we never find the time. And yeah, life is hard. I mean, I started writing after I become a mom and I was like, what am I even doing? I don't have time for this. But actually sit down and just write, even if it's a little bit at a time. Don't think that I'll do it later. And even if it's not good, that's fine. The first many books I wrote were total trash and I would never show them to anyone, but that's how you become better. And that's, you know, and read a lot of books, especially books that are similar to what you want to write. So if you want to write, children's book, read a lot of that. You'd be surprised how many people don't read, but they wanna write. So don't do that.

[27:26]Zibby Owens: Amazing. Well, Sonya, thank you so much. Thanks for talking to us about a thousand questions about your upcoming book. Thanks for being a part of the Washington Post

[27:34]Saadia Faruqi: World Kids Post Book Club. Thanks for talking to my daughter with me today. We really appreciate it. Oh my gosh, I appreciate your having me on. I love talking about my books, obviously, you can But I hope that, you your listeners give books from other cultures a chance because it can be so fun to learn about somebody who's different from you. And I promise that at the end of the book, you'll figure out you're not that different. So thank you. Love it. Oh, thank you so much. Have a great day. Bye.

[28:04]Zibby Owens: Bye bye.