What if the parts of yourself you silenced just to survive… were the ones calling you home?
Welcome Home is seen through the eyes of Isabel Meilin, who wanders through a mysterious house built from memory, where she meets Rabbit, Ox, Wolf, and Crane–inner protectors shaped by fear, duty, rage, and distance. Each carries a question: What do I need to feel safe enough to be seen?
Blending clinical insight with trauma-informed storytelling and the emotional landscape of diasporic identity, Welcome Home speaks to those who carry much, feel deeply and rarely feel safe, especially readers navigating intergenerational silence, diaspora identity, and emotional suppression.
Q&A
Congratulations on the publication of Welcome Home! What motivated you to write the book in this format, as opposed to a non-fiction text or a full-length novel?
A clinical textbook or another self-help book keeps readers at arm’s length. I didn’t want distance; I wanted recognition and resonance. So I wrote an illustrated non-fiction, a story you walk through, not a theory you study.
My publisher pushed back. Make it more straightforward, they said. Remove the Mandarin. Make it universal. I said no. The illustrations aren’t decoration, they’re the access point. A reader with dyslexia told me mine was the first psychology book he ever finished. Neurodivergent readers tell me the animals give them something to anchor to. When their attention drifts, they look at the illustrations and find their way back.
And I didn’t write a novel, because Isabel Mei-lin isn’t an invented character. She’s a composite of the clients I’ve sat with, and the parts of myself I once hidden away.
The themes of Welcome Home, such as intergenerational trauma and parts work, reflect your areas of clinical work. What drew you to trauma-focused work?
My father, mostly. When he was dying, I watched him take a client call from his chemo bed. Tuesday morning, 6am, IV in one arm, phone in the other. “You happy, I happy,” he’d say whenever I begged him to rest. He was Ox in Welcome Home before I had a name for it. The part that carries generations on its back and mistakes its own collapse for devotion. I inherited his work ethic. I also inherited his burnout template.
So I made one promise: I will not pass that forward. I recognise the same Ox in my client, in me, and in most of us who chose the helping professions. We run on fumes and call it strength.And what drew me deeper was this. When trauma work is done without consideration for culture, it can do more harm than healing. It can erase the very people it’s trying to help.
Throughout the story, Isabel Meilin encounters four parts of her: Rabbit, Ox, Wolf, and Crane. Why did you choose animals to represent her parts?
These animal archetypes carry weight, personal and cultural. In Chinese symbolism, Rabbit is the moon’s companion, easily startled. Ox is the burden-bearer. Wolf is a fiercely loyal protector. Crane means longevity and transcendence, always flying, never landing. Those meanings were already in my bones.
Animals also sidestep shame. People can’t say “I have rage.” They can say “that’s my Wolf,” and suddenly they’re curious instead of ashamed. I tested the idea on our most honest reader, our seven-year-old. He looked at the house and said, “They live in different rooms, and they can’t find each other.” That’s when I knew the concepts resonated.
We particularly enjoyed the inclusion of Wolf in the story. There can be a lot of complicated feelings around the angry or hostile parts of us. Can you tell us a bit about how you approached writing Wolf’s chapter?
Wolf was the hardest, and the one I have a lot of compassion for. In Chinese mythology, wolves are protectors. Fierce, loyal. But this Wolf had nowhere to put its rage. “Respect your elders” meant swallow it, or keep silent. “Don’t bring shame” meant turn it inward. So Wolf’s teeth pointed at herself. I refused to write Wolf as a monster to defeat. The illustrator drew the rage not as a beast but as shadow, space, breath. Because the work was never to get rid of Wolf, or push it away. The work is to give the rage somewhere safe to go. Anger isn’t the danger. Exiled anger is.
Isabel Meilin, our protagonist, and her struggles – to me (Priscilla) – feel really reflective of the diaspora experience, where she carries the culture and expectations of her family of origin while trying to fit in with her Western home. What do you wish more mental health professionals (or people in general) understand about the intersection of this identity and trauma?
When I was training, I went to therapy myself. I talked about my family. The duty, the expectations. And my therapist said, “You need to cut contact. If you don’t, you’re enmeshed. That’s unhealthy.” I sat there thinking: so my family is pathology? The Western psychology frameworks we are trained in assume independence is health and interdependence is dysfunction. As a result, we learn that our cultural way of knowing and relating is wrong, so we erase ourselves to fit in. A phenomenon I call cultural dissociation. I wish more clinicians understood you can’t heal someone by asking them to leave behind the people, the land and the lineage they come from.
One thing I’d love readers to notice. Our protagonist carries two names. Isabel was chosen, for survival, for Western legibility, for belonging. Meilin, 美琳, was inherited, for ancestors, for duty, for lineage. It means “beautiful jade”. In the book I describe it as a family heirloom passed down like an old jade pendant. Precious, but heavier than it looked. Every diaspora child knows that weight. Two names, two selves, two sets of expectations. Isabel Meilin’s journey isn’t about choosing one. It’s integration, not assimilation. Not two halves fighting for space. Both. We have always been both.
Welcome Home: Healing Trauma and Reclaiming Wholeness is out now through Hardie Grant.
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