Kris Tan, a BHS custodian, never imagined himself as an author when he was young, but through his journey of having kids, watching Hamilton, and working on short poems, he is now the author of two picture books. Tan also has a third book coming out soon, and is excited to keep sharing his work.
Tan is a custodian at BHS, and came to the school after working at University of California Berkeley, Target, and the Marine Corps. Tan grew up in the U.S. after immigrating here from Vietnam when he was two years old, and comes from a Chinese and Vietnamese family.
“So when I was growing up, my Vietnamese was horrible. I had Chinese slang. I was speaking to everybody, and they said, ‘You speak weird.’ You know, my parents were working so hard, they didn't correct my language,” Tan said.
Tan is married and has two children, who are nineteen and twenty two. His wife is Japanese, making his kids half Japanese, a quarter Chinese, and a quarter Vietnamese.
“That makes them, you know, really unique in their culture, right? So that's why I wrote my first book, basically, about the confusion of all those cultures.”
Tan's first published book is titled “Perfectly Imperfectly Perfect.” According to Tan, the direct inspiration for the book was realizing that no matter if his kids were “perfect” by definition, they are perfect to him. “You get exactly what you want. They’re perfect in their own way,” Tan said.
Another motivation for his first book came when Tan’s children were born. At the time, cellphones were not nearly as accessible as they are now, and wanting a way to capture his kids' faces as they aged, he decided to create a picture book about them—beggining the process circa 2018. Tan stumbled across an illustrator who lived in the UK at the time, and fell in love with his work. “I was like, wow, it would be perfect for him to draw my kids. So my first book was just for my own sake. I memorized my kids through cartoon characters,” Tan said.
Other than his children, Tan’s interest in writing was sparked by “Hamilton,” a musical about the Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. “I got into ‘Hamilton’ like two years after it got popular. I think my daughter first told me about this play that's really good, she said ‘You should check it out!’ I was like, nah, I don't want to. It's like rap and soap opera? It sounds ridiculous.” Two years later he found a clip of it on Youtube. “I'm, wow, that is actually pretty good. And then I got hooked on it, right? If somebody can do that, why can’t I write some poems?” Tan said.
Before he started authoring books, Tan served in the Marine Corps for five years, during which he learned leadership and found his voice. “As an Asian, we’re kind of quiet people, you know. We have a hard time expressing ourselves. We're like programmers, and you know, statistics guys, and the computer guys. But we don't really like, go out and become leaders, right?” Tan said. He says this kind of leadership helped him become an author. “If I want it, I go out and chase it,” he stated.
The second book Tan wrote is called “The Universal Truth of Water,” which was published in 2025. “This book came about because my best friend who I've known for 35 years, showed my poem (Perfectly Imperfectly Perfect) to his daughter. At the time she was four, and she's like, ‘I don't like it because the words are too big.’ So I was like, ‘I’m gonna write a book for you.” His friend's daughter loved the Baby Shark Song, so he wrote a book about fishes and sharks.
In “The Universal Truth of Water,” the main characters are the grandpa fish and the little fish. “So, the grandpa fishish is the older generation, and the baby fish is the new generation. You hear the story, when you're young you think you know everything, right? As you get older, you realize I didn't know anything. I'm not as smart as I think I am, there's so much to learn," says Tan. Tan has a new book about peacocks coming out soon, called Nom de Plume. “I got like 20 poems, I'm just waiting for the drawings,” Tan said.
If you want to learn more about Kris Tan, follow him on social media platforms, or buy his books! You can find his website at: https://emptycitybooks.pages.dev/#home