Abigail Hing Wen is not afraid to show readers the realities of life

Abigail Hing Wen has always been a storyteller.

Growing up, she told her younger siblings stories—personalized adventure tales involving them and their friends and cousins, in a world without adults. And when she was thinking of becoming a law professor, instead of writing an article she was tasked with, a novel came pouring out of her.

“That's when I realized, ‘Oh, there's something here,’” the 47-year-old tells me.

After that, she wrote five novels—“buried four of them along the way”—and published her first book, Loveboat, Taipei (2020), 10 years later. That first novel has since turned into a three-book series, following the love lives of a group of Asian diasporic teens in the same cultural immersion program. In addition, Wen’s debut novel was also adapted into a film, Love in Taipei (2023), which was originally released on Paramount+ but just dropped on Netflix earlier this month.

In her latest book, Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies, Wen leaves the high seas of the Loveboat universe and brings us a novel set in her Bay Area backyard of Silicon Valley. The book, which was published Aug. 13, follows teens Tan Lee and Winter Woo after the pair share a post-prom kiss, but agree to just stay friends since Tan’s parents are renting out rooms to Winter and her mother. Easier said than done when their parents go off on a joint trip to Hawaii, leaving Tan and Winter to babysit Tan’s younger sister Sana (a callback to those early adventure stories Wen used to tell her siblings, of kids having adventures without adults). And if that weren’t enough, Tan’s ex-girlfriend shows up from Shanghai after stealing money from her billionaire father, with thugs on her heels—forcing the group to run for their lives from international hackers.

I recently spoke with Wen about her latest novel, how to write an action-thriller, not being afraid to include the realities of life in young adult novels, and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Samantha Pak: Where did you get the idea for Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies?
Abigail Hing Wen: I had written a short story called The Idiom Algorithm for a Marissa Myers anthology. That was a Silicon Valley story about teenagers at Palo Alto High School. It was a love triangle, and an inverted trope of class warfare, where the kid from the wrong side of the tracks thinks he's the hero, and then he finds out actually, there's a legitimate perspective on the other side.

It was a very short story, like 5,000 words, and my editor liked it so much that she asked me to write a follow up. I was thrilled that I got to continue the journey with these characters. She'd been thinking about a babysitting story for 20 years, and so she said, “Could we do a babysitting story?” I loved it, but I was making the Love in Taipei movie at the time, and I felt this need for higher stakes. And so it turned into this thriller where (main character Tan’s ex-girlfriend) Rebecca Tseng comes back from Shanghai with a bunch of international thugs on her heels.

SP: Did you have any experience with writing thrillers in the past?
AHW: I love a lot of the John Woo movies, like Paycheck, and I love the Mission Impossible movies. Even those early adventure stories I told my siblings, they were all like that: A baddie and kids trying to outsmart them. It's actually, in some ways, closer to who I am.

But when I was learning to write, somehow Loveboat, Taipei ended up becoming my first book. And so the publishing industry wanted more rom-coms from me. I didn't even know it was a rom-com. I'm really thankful that Liz, my editor, let me write a thriller. (Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies) is a thriller and rom-com.

SP: When they wanted more rom-coms, did you feel, as a writer, pegged in? Like, “This is what I ‘have to do?’”
AHW: A little bit, yeah. I have so many ideas and so many stories to tell, and not all of them fit neatly into the young adult romantic comedy space.

SP: How was it to write a thriller in terms of the action scenes? How do you see it, and translate that into words? If you're doing a film or a show, it's visual, but how do you do that in written form?
AHW: I love that question. Most of the exercise for me is translating what I see in my head onto the page. Pacing is really important for young adults, and for thrillers. So it works both ways in that sense.

Usually, I write the whole novel. Once the story is done, then I trim it down. It's this fun, nerdy thing where you cut all the words, but you don't lose any content. And just by doing that sweep, it actually increases the pace so much. But you jam in the experience, and so that itself creates tension.

The other key is you can't overwrite some of these fight scenes, for example, because then it'll be too slow. And if you think about when you yourself are in that moment, you often will just catch flashes. You might not actually understand everything that's going on. It's all chaos until you're out of it and can process it.

SP: There were references to The Idiom Algorithm in (Kisses, Codes, and Conspiracies), of Tan trying to find Rebecca when she ghosted him. What was it like to revisit the characters?
AHW: That was really fun. Because in the short story, I knew them, but they were not as fleshed out. Everything happened so fast for Tan in the short story that I didn't really get a chance to process it later. It seemed like everything was fine, because he decided to go to prom with Winter (which is how this book starts). And so there was kind of a nice happy ending to the short. But then life went on. It turns out he had PTSD from that relationship.

And then Winter, I didn't feel like I knew her that well. We didn't really get into her head in terms of what it meant that her father passed away. She has a tick in the book of trying to crack the code on her father’s phone. And that was a really fun way to have her father, and her musings and feelings about her father, present.

SP: You also get to know Rebecca. You definitely see her growth, and you learn more about her. The book is told from Tan's perspective, but did you ever think of including Rebecca's and/or Winter’s as well?
AHW: Yeah, and we're definitely having conversations around what Rebecca’s story would look like. Her story is not fully told yet. There's still so much more she has to reach. She had an arc, a certain level of closure, but there's still so much more to go with her.

SP: Yeah. That was definitely something I did want to ask. Will Rebecca get a book?
AHW: What am I allowed to say about that? [Long pause.] Definitely thinking about it. Let’s say that.

SP: The shelter that the kids go to plays a big role in their adventures, on multiple levels. Where did you get the idea to have this shelter and also have it play such a big role in Winter's family's life?
AHW: I have always cared deeply about social justice. I grew up going to the Philippines and seeing the slums, and that was just part of my world. I grew up in Ohio, very squarely middle class. But I also saw how the other half lived. My dad was from Indonesia. It was a developing country, and I think I always just wanted to show those disparities. And this book actually shows both: Rebecca, who's the extreme, a billionaire's daughter, and the kids (living at a shelter).

SP: Who was your favorite character in this story? I loved (Tan’s younger sister) Sana. She just wants a cookie at Barnes and Noble. And when they finally get there, there's this reverence. And as a book nerd, I was like, “I understand that little girl.”
AHW: That was definitely something there for me too. I enjoyed all the kids. I think outside the main ones would be Sister Ava.

SP: She was amazing.
AHW: She's a badass nun, who is not a traditional nun. But she is a real nun—she genuinely loves these kids, protects, honors, and accepts. Not all religious people are good people, but there are good people who are religious people, and she's one of them.

That's very important to me. I come from a faith background myself, and I actually think that's the character of God—that God is accepting. God loves and includes. Sometimes, religious establishments don't get that.