Choosing Western YA Novels for Asian Students
Choosing Western YA novels for Asian students is not easy. How do we ensure the appropriacy of the reading material?
Parents and teachers always want their children to read more. But what are they supposed to read? This becomes a challenge for Asian young adults, particularly those living in Asia, since there are very few authors who write for this particular demographic.
Cultural Foreignness
Not every YA novel is suitable for Asian young adults. It’s not so much that the novels might be culturally inappropriate or even offensive (though that is one consideration); the issue is that you want to ensure the novels “speak” to your audience. They have to understand the experience of the characters for them to “get” the novel.
“Experience” is a pretty broad term. I think it can be broken up into a couple of factors. The first is the setting of the novel. A setting that is too culturally foreign can be challenging for the reader. By “culturally foreign,” I mean that the setting is unfamiliar to the reader’s everyday experience. It’s not the novel’s physical setting that matters. Dystopian novels, by definition, are foreign, since it involves an imaginary future setting. However, the cultural foreignness can come in the form of everyday rituals that are unfamiliar to some readers.
For instance, Alexander Kwame’s Crossover shows twin brothers whose lives revolve around basketball. When I introduced this novel to some of my students, their immediate reaction is, “don’t they have to study?” The verse-novel does discuss the brothers’ need to study, but the twin brothers’ and the family’s devotion to basketball is totally alienating. It’s not that Crossover is a terrible book; far from it. But in my experience, it is reserved for more advanced readers, readers who have had enough exposure to reading English YA novels, so they understand the cultural assumptions of the characters.
On the contrary, Judy Blume’s novels tend to be more readily accepted by beginner YA readers. In addition to the relatively simple language, the urban lifestyle the characters have — going to school, hanging out in an urban environment — is relatively easy to understand. There isn’t a sense of cultural alienation when readers begin to read the book.
Language Style
Another issue is the writing style. There are two sub-issues related to this. First, it is the language difficulty. For some Asian students, the language can get in the way of appreciating the story. Since they are still learning English, they need to be more familiar with sentence patterns they have seen before in their textbooks.
Here is an example from Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl, an otherwise excellent YA novel for students:
Ho Chi Minh City in the summer. Sweltering by anyone’s standards. Needless to say, Artemis Fowl would not have been willing to put up with such discomfort if something extremely important had not been at stake. Important to the plan.
This is very opening paragraph to the novel. Notice the first two sentences are not sentences proper. There is no verb. For students who have been drilled to learn about SVO structures, this is puzzling to say the least. Ho Chi Minh City might be in Asia, but many students wouldn’t know the English name of the city (they might not even know the name in their native tongue — Asia is huge and extreme diverse). “Sweltering” is also another challenging word. Note the structure of the third sentence: it begins with an adverbial, “Needless to say”, something that many students might not have heard of. Furthermore, we have a very complex “if” clause in this sentence, with past perfect continuous tense coupled with a modal verb. The phrasal verb “put up” could also cause confusion. The phrase “at stake” is also not commonly taught at school.
While a student probably wouldn’t be analyzing the text, the text nonetheless presents challenges in comprehension. And if a student is reading this text as a second language student, then they might very well have given up before they proceed to the next page.
Artemis Fowl, I would argue, is another advanced YA novel for Asian students.
Shifting Narratives
A third issue is how YA novels are narrated. The advanced narrative styles can often present challenges to Asian YA novel readers. The range of narrative techniques used by writers are extremely creative. However, this is contrasted by the relative poverty of literary education. Most public schools teaching an examination-oriented curriculum simply do not teach story narration. Most stories in textbooks are short (less than two pages); they are told in a linear fashion; the goal of these stories is always to illustrate language items or principles, rather than thinking about the telling of the story. So, if a student is suddenly thrusted into a story told in a unique manner, the confusion caused could turn the student off before they come to a point of appreciating how the story is told.
For instance, some students have trouble understanding the shifting narrators of Erin Entrada Kelly’s Hello, Universe. In this novel, the author is constantly shifting the focaliser to create fragments of narration as a technique to enable the reader to understand the multiple perspectives of the novel. However, in my experience, for many students this is a confusing experience. They are in fact asking the right questions about the novel: why is the story so fragmented? But coupled with comprehension challenges, the novel really tests the students’ patience.
Interestingly, some schools choose to cope with this problem by simply asking students to read an excerpt of the novel. For example, I’ve heard of one school assigning Part One of the story. Part One is Auggie’s narration. But that kind of defeats the point of the book, because the rest of the book tells the story from other characters’ point of view.
Without dedicated lessons to discussing literary techniques, schools do have to come up with ways to cope with challenges encountered by ESL readers when reading books that are culturally different and pedagogically challenging.
The Balancing Act
Personally, I believe that students should be exposed to foreign cultures, language styles and different narrative techniques. On the whole, it enhances students’ language capacity and enriches their imagination. However, I think teachers have to select books judiciously so that students are not entirely overwhelmed by the new language experience.
So, teachers have to choose YA novels carefully to engage young readers and without alienating them. And since we just don’t have many YA novels written by Asians for the Asian context, we have to continue to rely on Western YA novels to provide this learning experience.
Some books that I would recommend (based on my own experience) include:
- War Horse by Michael Morpurgo
- The Giver by Lois Lowry
- Hatchet by Gary Paulsen
- Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
- The Homework Machine by Dan Gutman
- Spy School by Stuart Gibbs
- Thirst by Varsha Bajaj
- The Runaway Girls by Jacquline Wilson
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