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.