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.