My Footprints

Overview

Bao Phi's picture book My Footprints follows Thuy, a young girl who dreads the walk home from school because of classmates who tease her for being different — for her Vietnamese heritage, and for having two moms. Snow covers the ground, and Thuy notices the tracks she leaves behind, plain and unremarkable, unlike the animals she wishes she could be instead.

To cope, Thuy retreats into imagination. With her mothers' help, she pictures herself as first one animal, then a combination of several, building a creature strong enough to face down what frightens her. The book follows that inventive process as much as it follows her literal footsteps through the snow.

Phi, better known for his work as a spoken-word poet, brings a lyrical economy to the text, pairing spare language with Basia Tran's illustrations to carry a story that is ultimately about a child assembling her own sense of courage and self-image piece by piece.

Imagination as a Response to Difference

What the book is really interested in is the gap between how a child is seen and how she wants to be seen. Thuy's bullying is tied to two distinct markers of difference — her ethnicity and her family structure — and the book declines to treat either as something to be minimized or explained away. Instead, it locates power in imaginative reinvention: rather than asking the world to stop noticing her differences, Thuy builds a mythic version of herself out of them.

That approach places My Footprints within a broader lineage of picture books that use fantasy and metaphor to process real social friction, rather than depicting bullying and its resolution in purely realistic terms. The presence of Thuy's two mothers is treated as ordinary family fact rather than a plot point requiring justification, which situates the book among a small but growing shelf of picture books depicting LGBTQ+ parents without making that the central conflict of the story.

Why My Footprints Has Been Challenged

Objections to the book center on its depiction of a same-sex parented family as unremarkable and its handling of childhood bullying tied to identity, both of which some challengers argue are inappropriate subject matter for young readers or belong to a category of content they want removed from school and library shelves rather than merely labeled. Others have raised concerns about the book's treatment of racial and cultural difference as material for classroom discussion at an early age. The book has been challenged or restricted in 2 states and 2 districts tracked in this catalog, generally as part of broader efforts targeting picture books that include LGBTQ+ family representation.