Lawyer to Children's Book Author
By Bill Spring
Corporate lawyer Janet Wong always thought that earning a good salary and accumulating material things meant that she was doing well, but it took rediscovering her childhood and turning these memories into children's books to make her understand that life is really about quality, not quantity.
Growing up in the Los Angeles area in the 1960s and '70s, Wong led a happy childhood and never spent much time thinking about what she wanted to be when she grew up. With a Japanese-born father and Korean-born mother, she knew that she was expected to excel.
"There's a lot of unspoken pressure in immigrant families." She explains. "You hear constantly how your parents have sacrificed, so you feel it's your duty to do well."
In 1979 Wong entered UCLA, choosing history as her major. She spent her junior year living in France, where visits to museums awakened a passion for fine art.
"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to be an artist?' " she remembers. "But I had no art training, and I didn't dare tell my father because I thought he wouldn't understand."
By the following year, with graduation approaching, Wong still had no career plans. Her father suggested law school, an option she considered about as good as any other. She gave herself an out, deciding she would go only if she got into a really good school. "Then I got into Yale, " she says, " and so I had to go."
After graduating from Yale in 1987, Wong spent a year at a law firm, and then took a position as director of labor relations at Universal Studios in Hollywood. Chief among her responsibilities was negotiating union contracts, but another of her tasks was firing employees.
The act of telling workers to pack up their things and get out, sometimes as often as 10 times in a week, started turning warm-hearted Janet Wong noticeably colder. "I said to my husband one night, 'I think I'm becoming a mean person,' and he said, 'I think you are.' "
Unhappy with this change, Wong decided it was time to look for a new path, even as her career was starting to take off.
Inspiration came when Wong found herself in a children's bookstore, looking for a gift for a two-year-old-cousin. "I had an armload of picture books that I fell in love with, and I thought, 'I would love to do this. Somebody has to write these books. Why couldn't I be one of these people?' "
Convinced that she could easily write books that were as good or better than those she saw on the shelves, Wong quit her job at Universal in 1991. She gave herself one year to sell a book and threw herself into writing.
In 1992, with her year almost up, Wong was discouraged. All she had to show for her hard work were dozens of unsold manuscripts and 26 rejection letters from publishers. She was on the verge of giving up, but her husband, Glenn Schroeder, also a lawyer, wanted her to give her writing some more time.
From the beginning, Glenn had thought Janet was missing the point by giving herself a year to become a published author. The better measure of success, he felt, was not money but happiness.
This was a new concept for someone who had always felt the need to prove herself with high grades, high salaries and things like reserved office parking spaces and expense accounts. Looking back at her year spent writing; Wong realized that she loved what she was doing, despite the rejections.
"If I had all day long to sit at my desk and write," she says, "I would be in heaven."
Wong decided to keep at it.
Thinking that a better understanding of rhyme and rhythm might help her writing, she signed up for a poetry class with Myra Cohn Livingston, the author of more than 80 books of poetry. One of Livingston's pieces had recently moved Wong to tears, so she knew this was a woman whom she could learn from.
Still, Wong's aim was not to become a poet. "I was going to learn poetry so that I could sharpen my prose and write better picture books," she claims. It came as something of a surprise that Wong's first breakthrough came with a collection of poetry.
"After about 10 weeks of sitting with Myra," she remembers, "I handed her a manuscript of poems, most of which had been written in class for homework. The next thing I knew, she had sold it."
The collection, titled "Good Luck Gold," contains poems about Wong's experiences growing up in Los Angeles, and was published by Simon & Schuster in October 1994.
"Seeing it published was like giving birth to as second baby," says Wong, referring to her only child Andrew, born shortly before "Good Luck Gold" hit the shelves.
In the nearly 10 years since then, Wong has written and sold 11 more picture books of poetry and prose, with more on the way. An upcoming book, "Minn and Jake," tells the tale of small-town lizard-catching 5th-graders, and like many of Wong's books, it's based on an episode in her own childhood.
It will be followed by "Knock on Wood: Poems About Superstitions," and most likely, countless popular books to come.
On the net: www.janetwong.com.
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