To All the Books I’ve Loved Before

I’ve been thinking a lot about the end recently.

The end of the semester, to clarify. I bring this up because it will also be the end of my graduate career (assuming I pass my portfolio defense – more on that later!). As I reflect on what it means to be awarded an M.A. degree, I ponder if my relationship with literature has changed. Do I put literature on a higher pedestal now? Have my “immature” interests matured? Has studying children’s and young adult literature led me to love it more or hate the flaws I’ve come to notice?

Which brings me to this blog post. Its title is a reference to the movie, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, whose teen romance genre reminds me of what drew me to the very first book I wrote a blog post about: I Love You So Mochi by Sarah Kuhn. I realized only in hindsight that what makes this novel one of my favorites is that despite all of the books I’ve read throughout the years that featured romance in any way, it was the first in which I actually found the love interest attractive. In fact, it was the first I had read in which there was an Asian male love interest.

There exist many novels in which young Asian American girls fall in love, but predictably, their love interests are often white (or unidentified, and therefore white by default in the popular imagination). The movie alluded to in this blog post’s title is one example, alongside Starfish by Akemi Dawn Bowman, Butterfly Yellow by Thanhha Lai, Fake it Till You Break It by Jenn. P Nguyen, I Believe in a Thing Called Love by Maurene Goo, and many others. It is much more likely to see an Asian American teenage girl fall in love with a white character than another Asian American or someone of another ethnicity, which perpetuates the stereotype of the submissive Oriental. What about the Asian American boys?

One reason that Asian American young men are not depicted as love interests might be the Asian American literary trope that Asian men are frequently depicted as effeminate or having the characteristics of a woman. Reclaiming Asian masculinity from this disparaging association that erases their distinctiveness is vital, and there is some progress within Asian American young adult literature. Young Asian American men are occasionally depicted as attractive, such as in I’ll Be the One by Lyla Lee wherein the love interest is a famous model. Novels such as this and I Love You So Mochi disrupt the notion that only white boys are of interest and instead provide much-needed representation.

Yet we run into another problem when Asian American teens fall in love with one another and date in YA literature. A surprising pattern emerges: the relationships very often hinge on secrecy, lies, and/or defying parental expectations. Rent a Boyfriend by Gloria Chao and Frankly in Love by David Yoon are several examples in which relationships are faked for parental approval. Somewhere Only We Know by Maurene Goo chronicles a relationship that develops over a day of lies about professional work, and Romeo and Juliet gets a contemporary, Vietnamese American spin in Loan Le’s A Phở Love Story. When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon and A Taste for Love by Jennifer Yen feature parents who select dating partners for their children. Just a cursory glance at texts that feature young Asian American protagonists shows that romance is nearly always entangled with deception and parental involvement.

Despite this, these novels are engaging. Their protagonists grapple with parental expectations out of love for these family members, and the casual depiction of cultural markers is comforting. Rather than repackage tropes, these novels integrate Asian American experience with the familiarity of teenage romance. New characterizations fit in smoothly with canonical ones: respectfully reserved, shy young men, abrasively opinionated, good-hearted young women, physically attractive boys, and intellectually impressive girls claim their spaces in the pages. This genre will continue to expand, and with it, the conceptualization of what it looks like to be Asian American and in love will continue to grow. Asian American YA romance has much potential to delineate the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” of Asian American culture advocated for by Lisa Lowe (66). 

Having explored the genre of Asian American young adult romance that was so special to me before this M.A. program because of how rarely I encountered it, I return to my question: do I love it more or do I hate the flaws I’ve come to see? My answer is that I still love it. Though I was initially dismissive of the importance of representation as I entered graduate studies, choosing Asian American children’s literature as my specialization has led to representation becoming more meaningful to me than before I had embarked on this exploratory journey. I’ve read and appreciated Asian American YA literature in the past, but this graduate assistantship has allowed me to validate it to myself and spotlight it for others to appreciate. What I’ve learned throughout my time as a blogger of children’s literature academia is that it is worth it to critically examine what captivates us. We’ll emerge with a more robust, complex understanding of all the books we’ve loved before.

-       (A.N.)

*Special thanks to Magical Reads Blog, which has a lengthy list of YA romances with Asian Characters. Definitely worth taking a look at!

https://magicalreads7.wordpress.com/2020/05/14/list-ya-romances-with-asian-characters/

 

Scholarly Works Referenced

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Duke University Press, 1996. 

Not Lunar New Year

 

When I noticed that Lunar New Year fell on Friday the 12^th of February, I thought it would be a perfect chance to highlight an Asian American text in a blog post. Browsing for suitable books, I came across a beautifully illustrated cover – that of A Big Mooncake for Little Star by Grace Lin. I placed a hold immediately, eager to read and blog about a literary depiction of the Asian holiday so often eclipsed by Valentine’s Day.

The cover of A Big Mooncake for Little Star by Grace Lin

As I read it, delighting in the lovely images that softly illuminate the starry sky background, I quickly realized that the storyline had nothing to do with Lunar New Year.

Why had I made that assumption?

The fact that I had associated mooncakes with the wrong Asian holiday felt like a personal mistake, and the shame I felt upon recognizing this was both uncomfortable and surprising. I’ve only ever eaten mooncake around the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is clearly months before Lunar New Year rolls around in February. This wasn’t something I had to look up; I knew this from my own upbringing.

 

    

Images from San Diego’s Huy Ky Bakery (Yelp), the mooncakes I grew up eating!

But in my need to position myself as a graduate student specializing in Asian American children’s literature, I had taken on the mantle of representation to a fault. I had latched onto the idea that I had to display traditional food and a festive holiday, falling right into the diversity trap that offers limited and often damaging representations of cultures through what Dolores de Manuel and Rocío G. Davis call “tourist-multiculturalism.” Though seemingly benign, this method of showcasing texts (often in classrooms or library displays) emphasizes Asian culture as foreign or different than American culture. This construction elides the experience of Asian Americans, who must contend with and sometimes reject ethnic markers to even be recognized as American. Asian American experience is more than Asian traditions, and to look for “foreign” or “exotic” elements in a book to mark it as “Asian American” is a flawed way to showcase the diversity of this genre and the multiplicity of the population it depicts.

Lin strikes a thoughtful balance in this picture book. For starters, the protagonist’s name, Little Star, does not indicate any particular ethnic heritage. The background images do not provide any clues such as writing or cultural artifacts to this mystery either. The characters’ country of origin simply does not matter to the story. What does matter is Little Star’s agency. Her desire to eat the mooncake, in spite of the promise she made to her mother to not touch it, leads her to munch away at it night by night until nothing is left. That the large mooncake was hung in the sky lends the storyline a touch of magic. The result is a new “myth” to explain the phases of the moon, distinct from the traditional stories of the past.

By writing a new storyline, Lin evades the historical use of multiculturalism, wherein “the proliferation of folktales meant to teach Americans about Asian cultures instead reinforces and perpetuates the stereotype of Asians as exotic foreigners” (Manuel and Davis ix). Rather than focus on difference by rooting the story in a particular ethnic heritage, Lin focuses on what is relatable: the irrepressible desire to eat forbidden snacks. A Big Mooncake for Little Star is not meant to be didactic or to teach an uninformed audience. Instead, it allows Asian Americans who have eaten mooncake before to see a bit of their traditions portrayed casually, without emphasis on its “foreignness.”

Image from Grace Lin’s A Big Mooncake for Little Star

What I’ve learned from this experience, and what I hope those who are interested in children’s literature will recognize, is that not all books highlighting Asian characters and a traditional Asian food is immediately speaking to an “authentic” Asian American experience. I still have a long way to go before I can present myself as a scholar of Asian American children’s literature, but beautiful books such as this can help correct initial misreadings. The lesson: don’t judge a book by its title, cover image, or author’s last name! Instead, just open it up and allow yourself to be surprised by something new.

-AN

Works Cited

Manuel, Dolores de and Rocío G Davis. "Editors' Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Asian American Children's Literature." The Lion and the Unicorn, vol. 30 no. 2, 2006, p. v-xv. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/uni.2006.0023.

Lin, Grace. A Big Mooncake for Little Star. Little, Brown and Company, 2018.