Can Asian American KidLit #StopAAPIHate?
As APIA Heritage Month ends and Children’s Awareness Month begins, children’s literature by, for and about APIAs might be an answer
This is adapted from “Mirrors, Doors, and Prisms: A Guide to Organizing an Asian Pacific Islander American Children’s Literature Event in Your Community.” The full guide is available at bit.ly/apiakidlit.
“We all, to some degree, absorb the mythologies around us, our vision refracted by the prisms of our particular time and place.”
— Pulitzer-Prize Winning Journalist Alex Tizon“Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors….When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.”
— NCTE member Rudine Sims Bishop
Since before the U.S. recognized COVID-19 as a global health pandemic, APIA communities throughout the U.S. were reporting an increase in physical attacks, shunning, harassment, housing discrimination and other violence. Assailants targeted both young and elderly Asian women, including several daylight attacks of Asian children or adults with children present. Many stories highlight and sensationalize stories where the assailant is another person of color, and promoting the expansion of power of government agencies that have traditionally surveilled, criminalized and/or incarcerated APIAs and other people of color en masse.
The deliberate and strategic insertion of APIAs into different regions, jobs, citizenship pathways, etc., has fueled durable and interchangeable stereotypes like the “model minority”, “yellow peril”, “lotus blossom”, etc. that are not limited to the media by type or target audience. You can see them across children’s media and consumer products, from video games, Halloween, toys, and television and movies, perhaps most famously perpetuated by Disney. These representations create deep harm on a personal level and play a fundamental role in the the racist violence and discrimination APIAs experience daily and episodically. As Veronica Wang shared in a blog on kollabosf.org:
“[U]nfortunately for me, Mulan was the film our teachers presented during a Chinese history unit. I had to brace myself for the same comments and questions — ‘You know, you kind of look like Mulan. Can you teach me my name in Chinese? Is it true Chinese people kill girls for breaking the rules? Don’t you get tired of Chinese food?’ Despite years of sharing classes and interacting with me regularly, my classmates were influenced by stereotypes.”
These representations perpetuate, condone and normalize violence against Asian people, with specific dimensions for young Asian girls who are hypersexualized according to a long tradition of media representations of Asians and Asianness.
As [a] School Library Journal blog post notes, non-white parents are three times more likely to talk about race to their children than white parents. Even at a young age, children do categorize themselves into groups.
Offering children “windows, doors and mirrors” through children’s literature can be a meaningful intervention in dismantling a long history of distorted and refracted representations of APIAs.
“When we say, ‘we need diverse books,’ we do not mean that books by marginalized people are only for marginalized people. We are pointing out the dearth of, alongside the need for, diverse books. And everyone needs diverse stories. Imagining someone else’s internal life vividly enough to feel it within yourself is how we reshape culture and unlearn false ideas. How we defuse fear and begin asking questions instead of making assumptions. How we expand our circles beyond the people in our immediate vicinity. How we face evil and refuse to allow it to win. We cannot build a better world if we cannot imagine ourselves together in it.
“Stories of marginalized people are not here for tidy consumption. They are not here to be simply swallowed and passed through for nutritional value by people who have not lived our lives. They are how we acknowledge that our past, no matter how recent or distant, is not merely history but a living, vital part of our present. We carry it with us. These stories are an attempt to capture the texture and richness of our experiences, and to shape the future we hope to see. They are a reminder to keep fighting for progress.”
— JoAnn Yao, We Need Diverse Books
Like all children of color, Asian American children are subjected to systemic racism. Despite the growing number of APIA children with a right to quality education and books that reflect their communities, core curriculum that includes them is ubiquitously absent from K-12 public education systems across the U.S. Learning Asian American stories and history would help dismantle the two primary myths that racialize APIA children — that they are a so-called model minority and perpetually foreign to American history, culture and society.
And, just having a few books with Asian protagonists isn’t enough. The danger of systemic racism in media representation, including in children’s literature and publishing, includes the danger of “one story”. As Joanna Ho, author of the children’s book Eyes That Kiss in the Corners said in the days following the March 2021 killings of 6 Asian American women working at Atlanta massage businesses: “Books can be tools we use to build anti-racist foundations, or they can be tools that we use to uphold systems of oppression…. What are ways I can use this book to help students be critical about what they think is normal and beautiful, not [continue] to uphold those standards. We’re not going to ‘kind’ or ‘empathy’ our way out of systemic racism…. What kind of strength does that take [if] you’ve been taught your whole life [that] you’re not beautiful and you’re not powerful? It is so much more than learning to see other people and walk in their shoes－it’s about being actively anti-racist.”
We must shift the focus from narrow conversations typically undergirded by cultural racism instead towards an understanding of how systems work together to reinforce the status quo. APIA communities exist across a range of classes, gender identities, disabilities, languages, traumas intergenerational and present, age groups, geographies and other contexts that speak to our vast “heterogeneity, hybridity and multiplicity” and varying relationships to power－and all of these stories deserve telling.
Check out “Mirrors, Doors, and Prisms: A Guide to Organizing an Asian Pacific Islander American Children’s Literature Event in Your Community” to elevate authentic APIA children’s stories in your area. The full guide is available at bit.ly/apiakidlit.
