5 Fun Facts About ‘My Strange Shrinking Parents’ with Zeno Sworder

Illustration by Zeno Sworder.

1. Strange Inspirations

My Strange Shrinking Parents is a fairytale woven together with some of my experiences growing up. It recounts some of the ways in which my Chinese mother narrowed and burdened her own life to raise a young family in a small Australian country town. In a way, the book is the map that I desperately needed as a child who felt out of place. I hope that it provides readers with a different example of family and love that is a bit more than just hugs and sunshine.

Photography by Zeno Sworder.

2. A Drawn out Process

The initial plan was to complete the book in a period of roughly ten months. In the end it took more than two years to finish. My early version of the book was more cartoony in style with very generalised characters. The publisher wisely nudged the book in a more specific direction so that it could be grounded with more realistic characters based on my own experience. This helped draw out the universal themes of sacrifice and belonging that are at the heart of the book. 

Illustration by Zeno Sworder.

3. Echo of Childhood Friends

This story is also an echo of the stories of many friends who came from single parent and migrant households. Growing up and spending time in their homes, I recognised my own parents’ sacrifices and I learned something about the strange nature of love – the many different ways it can be shown – and how when given it doesn’t only enlarge the person receiving the love, it enlarges the person giving it as well.

4. The Most Difficult Page

The most difficult page of the book was the very last image. Central to the book and its structure is the idea of love being cyclical. The book opens with the parents caring for their young child and closes with the child caring for his elderly parents. While the text did not change, the image that would work best was a question the publisher and I kept on returning to. After drafting a number of different images we finally settled on the very first picture I ever made of the parents: two tiny figures standing in a garden watching the sun set.

Illustration by Zeno Sworder.

5. Artistic Sensibility

The art in the book is heavily inspired by the ukiyo-e artists Hokusai and Hiroshige. I grew up surrounded by Asian art and my Chinese grandmother was a traditional brush and ink painter. There is a page in the book that pays homage to her work where the boy imagines his parents walking through a Chinese landscape painted on a teapot. While I am not a formally trained artist, I pray that the book has been made in an artful way and that it provides an engaging story and captures some of the emotion that was poured into the making of it.