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.

Real Identities and Diversity in Children’s Picture Books

On September 19, 2018, Camila Rae Castillo-Smith was born, and all of the sudden, I’m searching for picture books that tell her the story of both her Black and Mexican heritage. All of the sudden, I’m grappling with how to discuss blended heritage and culture with my first grandchild. I thought because my husband is mixed race and because my beautiful daughter is mixed race that I knew exactly how to handle this situation. But when Rocío, Camila’s mother, said that she was struggling to find books with characters that Camila could identify with, I realized this may be more difficult than I thought. The issue is complicated not only by a number of historically political notions about race, but also by the many ways that we identify ourselves, which means I have to ask some not so obvious questions.

Am I Black or African American? Is Mexican the same as Latinx? How Camila constructs her identity will have a lot to do with how we, her mother, father, and their families, define ourselves. In Roberto Carlos Garcia’s article on The Root, “So You’re Afro-Latinx. Now What?,” He notes, “America thrusts black or white upon you quickly, and you have to decide, you have to know who and what you are” (Garcia). This knowing, though, takes time as Camila comes to this realization with a barrage of influences. As she comes of age, she will work through how her family identifies themselves and hopefully discover for herself where she fits. The books that we read to her in the early stages of this development will strengthen her foundation. So, my search for picture books about children who are both Mexican and Black continues.

While there are a number of books about mixed race characters, so many of them seem to focus on children whose race is mixed with white. There are very few stories about children who celebrate their mixed minority races, and I have yet to find one about a child like Camila. My search, though not entirely in vain, reveals a collection of stories that some may say is too specific. But haven’t the books before the push for diversity also been too specific? Just as Camila will likely read books about children who are not like her, the children who are not like her should also read books about children like Camila. This helps to encourage empathy and compassion for people who are not like us.

It is the desire to see one’s self represented that leads to diverse books. “‘Diversity’ should just be called ‘reality.’ Your books, your articles, your curricula need to reflect reality” (Due). So maybe we, Camila’s family, should write the story that we’d like to tell her, children like her, and the children who want to get to know her. Children are very different, and we should be okay with acknowledging that.

I’m extremely proud that Rocío immediately saw the importance of Camila knowing who she is early on. And while I took this for granted when I was her age, I’m open to learning as my family grows.

Click here for a list of children’s picture books that celebrate diverse, real identities.

(KT)

The Lasting Effect of Diversity Talks in Education

           For educators to ask young Black person, someone who is not often represented in canonical literature, to divulge the title of the book that had the greatest impact on them as a child can be a sort of loaded question. As a Black person who grew up in South Georgia, it was especially challenging for me to recall reading texts such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or To Kill a Mockingbird and remember the old let’s take turns reading this aloud as a class exercise. Imagine for a moment sitting in class with a white teacher surrounded by mostly white students and hearing “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a n*****[1]; but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.”[2]  Imagine being on the receiving end of curious stares when a white classmate reads “Well, if they like it, Tom, all right; but I don’t want to be a king and have only just a given name, like a n*****.”[3] Imagine the confusion a child would feel hearing a classmate read the following passage aloud as if it’s normal conversation: “Suppose you and Scout talked colored-folks’ talk at home it’d be out of place, wouldn’t it? Now what if I talked white-folks’ talk at church, and with my neighbors? They’d think I was puttin’ on airs to beat Moses.”[4] My teacher in those classes did not take the time to highlight the objectification of the human beings in these texts. She in no way reached out to those of us who were obviously uncomfortable. She did not handle this potentially pivotal moment in a way that would invite the Othered beings in the class into the conversation. We, like the Othered characters in the texts, remained in the margins.

These novels, set in what most simply refer to as The South, normalize referring to Black people as “n******” and “colored folks.” Situating these novels within their historical context is important to discussions about the literary canon because doing so exposes the pitfalls of American culture. According to Randall Kennedy, “. . . regardless of Twain’s intentions, Huckleberry Finn (like any work of art) can be handled in a way that is not only stupid but downright destructive of the educational and emotional well-being of students”[5] Texts such as these reveal issues not only with race, but also with issues of gender, class, and nationalism to name a few. Often times, the discussions about what is wrong in these novels stop at how freely the authors use derogatory language, but there are much bigger issues that are often ignored in mainstream and academic discourse about the works. Let’s have a discussion about how the novels illustrate how white children learn about race and racism. Let’s have a discussion about how the novels depict children’s indoctrination into classism. Let’s have a discussion about how these novels are the Southern bildungsroman. So yes, they are painful to read but they definitely should not be burned or banned because that is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. These problematic texts illustrate a part of American culture that many want to pretend did not happen. But it did happen. It happened to people who went on to have children of their own, and those children are now living with a different version of the same issues. What novels are they reading? Do they see themselves represented in their assigned reading? What will they learn about how America sees them when their classmates are asked to read aloud?

Fortunately, educators, scholars, publishers along with children’s and young adult authors are making great strides in building a catalogue of scholarly and fictional works that call out canonical works. Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, for example, discusses the complicated nature of “race talk dilemmas” in her article, “‘We Always Talk About Race’: Navigating Race Talk Dilemmas in the Teaching of Literature” (2015). Thomas notes that “Reading literature that wrestles with both the history of race in the United States and contemporary race relations encourages a critical view of social and cultural reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), with the ultimate intent of creating ethical and literate citizens (Alsup et al., 2006)”⁶. We all play a role in the development of discourse and the subsequent discussions about intersectional identities. Fortunately, there are a great many more diverse books (https://diversebooks.org/resources/) being published from the perspective of various American identities and this gives us all an arsenal of texts to be taught in place of or preferably in conjunction with canonical and banned books. Most importantly, these texts provide an array of identities that reflect the lives young people in America today.

Check out the following links for additional resources:

·      https://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/p/books-that-reference-littl.html

·      https://booktoss.blog/social-justice-issues-2/

·      https://www.gse.upenn.edu/news/ebony-elizabeth-thomas-diverse-books-children

·      https://blog.leeandlow.com/2018/05/10/the-diversity-gap-in-childrens-book-publishing-2018/

(KT) 

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[1] Kennedy, Randall L. (1999). Who Can Say "Nigger"?...And Other Considerations. Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, (26), 86-96.

[2] Twain, M., & McKay, D. (1948). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Illustrated junior library). New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

[3] Twain, M., & McKay, D. (1946). The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Illustrated junior library). New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

[4] Lee, H. (1982). To Kill a Mockingbird (Warner books ed.). New York: Grand Central Pub.

[5] Kennedy, R. (2002). Nigger: The strange career of a troublesome word (1st ed., Black thought and culture). New York: Pantheon Books.