Cindo is 12 years old. The is the youngest of three girls, including Em and Jess. They and their mother live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cinds’ besties in middle school are Grace and Kelsie. She practices the piano. She likes school, and she likes to draw.
The world of Cindy Chang’s junior graphic novel, How to Draw a Secret (2025), has at its center an appealing young character who is living in a secret of others’ making. Her father moved out of the family home some four years ago and has only made an occasional appearance. He was Big Bear to Cindo’s Little Bear.
While the family looks appealingly posed to the outside world, inside, the experience is full of anxieties.
Cindy fantasizes of an idealized world in which her talent magically mends family relationships and re-knits everyone back into a whole state. The passing of their paternal grandmother, Nai Nai, brings the family back to visit Taiwan, the island from which her parents came to study in the U.S., back when.
Their family reads as all-American, except that they eat a lot of Chinese food, and their mother is fairly strict about their studies and their practicing their respective musical instruments. An art contest at her school is built around the them of “what family means to me.” Cindy wants to illustrate a perfectionist version of her family, in the same way as she sketched a still life of fruit in a bowl, with no bruises on the fruits. She finds the appeal of fantasy perhaps more compelling and comforting than reality. She goes through “all the feelings” in this moment.
How to Draw a Secret is a story well told, with flashbacks to critical moments, such as when their mother pretended that her husband was around to a plumber, to save face. There is another when Cindy’s father first left. There are panels in which the newly-left family adjusts to making small fixes around the house and repairing furniture. Even as the family of a mother and her three daughters adapts, the secrets of parental relationships remain unspoken.
Will Cindo succumb to social pressures and fall in line with the parents’ narratives of their “intact” family? Will young Cindo break out of social conformity and see outside of it? Will she be able to forgive her father for his leaving and accept him in some role in her life, even if she does not yet know if he will play an important role in it or not?
In this graphic novel, art plays a cathartic role for Cindo. Her friendships and social media are important supports in her life. Her family is starting to disperse, with one elder sister in college and the next scouting out schools.
In Taiwan, she sees more clearly that she is as her mother calls her and her sisters, “ABC’s” (American-born Chinese), with awkward spoken Taiwanese and limited reading of written Chinese. Their dining out and shopping in Taiwan are especially entertaining interludes, with some funny cultural awkwardnesses. Cultural practices and some spiritual beliefs are highlighted around the death of Nai Nai.
Unresolved family issues come to a head in the Taiwan visit. This is a family that lets loose, in revealing ways. Some profound observations are made by Cindo.
The drawings are memorable, evocative, and well tinted. The family members each have their own sense of personality, which are evoked visually and in their dialogue and interactions with the others.
Author and illustrator Cindy Chang was born and raised in the SF Bay area. She has degrees in computer science and education from Stanford University. She works as a digital product designer. How to Draw a Secret is her first book.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
