16 | The Writer • January 2020
slowly learn a precise, tender love for the English
language. Suddenly, she wanted to be a writer.
She’d staple together bits and pieces of stories into
her own “novels,” her name stamped on the cover,
copying what she saw at the library. It wasn’t until
high school that she actually understood writing
could be a career path for some lucky authors. But
fiction seemed like a mystical activity, something
you got to do if you were born with superpowers.
So, after graduating, Lu moved to Los Angeles
to study political science at the University of
Southern California. She graduated intending to
pursue a law degree, but after classes wrapped up
and the degree was hers, she felt not triumphant
but stuck. Wandering campus, she saw an ad for
a video game internship at Disney Interactive
Studios – an encounter so serendipitous it would
go on to provide a foundation for her fiction,
most obviously in her sci-fi Warcross series. She
applied, got in as an artist and design intern, and
ended up working in the video game industry for
half a decade.
Her gaming career gave her the drive to pursue
writing more seriously. For 12 years, she wrote,
then got rejected. Wrote. Got rejected. She drilled
through four unpublished manuscripts before
reaching the nugget that would become Legend.
Liam Neeson, in the end, was the answer. Or,
rather, Les Miserables, the 1998 version starring
Neeson, Geoffrey Rush, Uma Thurman, and Claire
Danes. While watching the film, Lu questioned
whether teen versions of Jean Valjean and Inspec-
tor Javert might resonate with a modern audience,
but it wasn’t until she read an online news article
about climate change that her worldbuilding“I WANTED TO WRITE IT FOR YOUNG
PEOPLE WHO ARE FEELING THAT SENSE
OF UNCERTAINTY RIGHT NOW.
LIKE, ‘WHERE ARE WE GOING? ARE
WE GOING TO BE OKAY?’ AND I
WANTED THEM TO FEEL LIKE, AT LEAST
IN THIS FICTIONAL WORLD, YOU WILL
GET YOUR ANSWER.”working; those under a certain Level can’t access
public transportation or healthcare; bullies can
hijack the system by saying kind words in a
mocking, cruel way.
As Eden is drawn into the gambling system of
Ross City, he’s sucked into a danger even Day might
not be able to conquer. Especially without June.
It’s not hard to see the similarities between Lu’s
cyclical futuristic dystopias and the oft-touted
American “meritocracy” of today. Lu’s metaphors
aren’t exactly subtle, but they needn’t be – because,
as young readers across America have realized,
they aren’t all that far-fetched.
The first Legend book was originally published
in 2011, and even then Lu’s story simmered with
the sort of sociopolitical and environmental anxi-
ety that can feel suffocating to teens in 2019. The
book “was very much influenced by what was
happening in our society, both good and bad,” Lu
says. “The fact that we had someone so hopeful as
president, but you could see the crumbling, the
rot happening underneath the log.”
Rebel was Lu’s chance to indirectly address the
ways the world has shifted in the years since her
first book. The rot she predicted has revealed
itself in a different president and the violence,
political division, racism, sexism, xenophobia,
discrimination, income inequality, and climate
change threatening the country and planet. It can
be a scary world.
But Lu says that’s the gift of YA, and specifi-
cally a YA series that continues on, even years
after its expected end. It isn’t just about indulging
in and rebooting the same story. It isn’t just about
nostalgia. These books give teens a chance to
breathe again. That’s why she wrote Rebel, as a
chance to show her readers a world that exists
after dystopia – a world where teens like Eden are
strong, even when nothing seems guaranteed.
“I wanted to write it for young people who are
feeling that sense of uncertainty right now,” Lu
says. “Like, ‘Where are we going? Are we going to
be OK?’ And I wanted them to feel like, at least in
this fictional world, you will get your answer.
This is something I can control.”
‘I dreamed a dream’
Born in China, Lu immigrated to New Orleans
before settling in Houston with her family, all
before she’d turned 10 years old. In kindergarten,
Lu returned home every afternoon – per her
mother’s instruction – with five English words
she’d heard at school but didn’t understand. She’d
look them up, test them out in sentences, and