Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction

Introduction: Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction

Ymitri Mathison

As the invisible minority, Asian Americans are generally stereotyped under one monolithic umbrella, with most Americans not aware of the diversity of ethnicities and races the term comprises. Asian American children and adolescents are even more invisible than adults. Frequently stereotyped under the rubric of the model minority myth, Asian American kids feel pressured to perform academically, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Many also feel they should be disinterested in or not good at sports, except, of course, martial arts. Boys are expected to be physically unattractive nerds, while girls are expected to be petite and beautiful. Asian American kids are also made invisible by mainstream society through a willful blindness: they are frequently not seen as a minority but rather as honorary whites, assumed to have the conservative white values of family and a strong work ethic even while having the distinctive Asian characteristic of not asserting themselves. Their very abilities to assimilate—seemingly to subsume their ethnic identity into whiteness and to perform within the mainstream culture—are made into an asset. Given this conundrum, how do Asian American children assert their subjectivity or identity in American society? How do they not only become Asian and American but also retain their ethnicity?

The various young adult(YA) novels analyzed in Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction go beyond the stereotypes that Asian American children and adolescents face in society by depicting how their characters define their unique identities within both mainstream society and their ethnic communities and families. Such identity work is not new. In 1930, sociologist Max Handman noted that American society has no social technique for handling partly colored races,¹ or, in other words, Americans who are not white but who are also not of African descent. He pointed out that the Mexican is not a Negro, and [that] the white man refuses him an equal status.² Though the focus of Handman’s research was on Mexican farmworkers, his failure to even mention the existence of Asian and Asian American farmworkers on the West Coast and in Hawai’i is just one of many examples of Asian Americans being ignored by the larger American society.

Such invisibility is still the norm more than eighty-five years later. As David Leiwei Li argues, Asian Americans are strangled between the authentic white subject and the oppositional black subject, with Asian Americans at once defined and ‘derealized’.³ Because they are essentially not seen as a racial threat the way African Americans often are, they are dismissed under the rubric of the model minority stereotype. Although Asians have been in the United States for the past three centuries, when white Americans encounter Asian Americans, they often assume they must be recent immigrants to this country and that they do not belong here. Asian Americans may be considered to be perpetual foreigners or immigrants rather than natives.

The Asian American teenager must deal with a society that sees him or her within a model minority stereotype and as an exoticized perpetual foreigner. It is not unusual for Asian American youths, especially South Asians and Muslims, to hear, Go back to your country. As a result, growing up in the United States in the latter part of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, during a time of multiculturalism and within the age of globalization and extensive immigration from the Asian continent, first-, 1.5-, second-, and multiple-generation Asian American children and adolescents need to navigate between more than their ethnicity and the mainstream culture; they must also negotiate between their parents’ homelands, their immigrant communities within the United States, their ethnic American (second-generation) communities, and mainstream American society. Asian American kids also face the same issues children or teenagers of any race may encounter, such as anxieties surrounding their changing bodies, sexuality, and identities as a part of growing up.

The chapters in this book address the complex negotiations in which the fictional Asian American child or teenager must engage, personally and across national borders, which can include different ethnicities, races, languages, and cultures. The Asian American teenager must synthesize multiple identities and communities while attempting to define a unique identity. Aihwa Ong suggests that the term trans can help us to understand the complexity of the interstitial spaces that the Asian American teenager, both real and fictional, can encounter. She argues that in the age of globalization, "trans denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something. Besides suggesting new relations between nation-states and capital, transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behavior and imagination that are incited, enabled, and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism.⁴ Although Ong’s focus is on the nation-state and capitalism, her idea of trans can be extrapolated to evoke the definition of interstitiality—the process of in-betweenness—and how identity can be constructed as moving through space and across time"; in other words, how a linear delineation of identity does not express the complexity of the many different identities Asian American children and teens may be juggling. Many of the contributors to this collection point to the interstitial spaces that the fictional counterparts of such children inhabit—the in-betweenness of holding and negotiating between several different identities simultaneously. The following chapters demonstrate that Asian American children, as depicted in fiction, are very adept at moving and negotiating between several different identities in different spaces and situations. In essence, they have fusionistic and nonlinear identities that transcend time and space.

From Mainstream to Asian American Young Adult Literature

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the publication of a handful of trailblazers in Asian American fiction for children and young adults, including John Okada’s No-No Boy (1956), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), and Laurence Yep’s Newbery award–winning novel Dragonwings (1975). But only at the end of the twentieth century, when second-generation American-born or first-generation immigrant children of immigrant parents began writing, did more than a handful of Asian American writers of children’s and adolescent fiction begin to appear with any regularity on the lists of mainstream children’s book publishers. Indian-born Dhan Gopal Mukerji won a Newbery award in 1928 for his novel Gay Neck: The Story of a Pigeon (1927), but it was almost fifty years later that Laurence Yep won the Newbery award for Dragonwings (1975). And it would take another twenty-five years before Korean American Linda Sue Park won the award for A Single Shard in 2001. Since Park, books by Asian American women writers have won or been named Newbery Honor Books every few years. The chapters in Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction analyze some of these award-winning texts, as well as other major texts within most of the larger Asian American ethnicities (Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Vietnamese), giving the reader a representative look at some of the more common issues in the field of Asian American YA writers, such as poverty, class struggles, interethnic conflict, domestic abuse, rape, death of parents, bulimia and other weight issues, bullying, and racism. The chapters in this book also dismantle the model minority stereotype by showing the reader the complexity of the Asian American characters’ lives and communities as they embrace their complex interstitial identities within a larger American culture.

Most YA fiction written by authors of color, especially Asian American YA fiction, adheres to the traditional, Eurocentric, bildungsroman plot (the coming-of-age of the main character) even as its authors reimagine this plot structure to reflect the realities of Asian American experiences. Such experiences often include the realities of immigration and poverty, rather than what critics have identified as the traditional white, middle-class, pastoral experience. Robert Hemmings argues that during the Golden Age of children’s literature (from the Victorian age to the early twentieth century), the myth of innocence figures children as functionaries serving the needs of the adult writer and reader for whom childhood signifies escape from the pressures of a modern, industrialized, polluted, and exploitative adult world.⁵ This idea, still present in children’s literature, especially in YA fiction’s most popular genre, the bildungsroman, focuses on a white, European–American, pastoral, idyllic, middle-class, privileged life in the country or, in the present day, in the suburbs. Susan Honeyman cautions against such a romanticized, idealized view of childhood, which she suggests can be a prison-house for the child because it serves adults’ needs to keep the child innocent. Ideal childhood is constructed as a luxury of prolonged dependence and sanctioned irresponsibility, as well as a perceived right to protection that relatively few people throughout the world and history have [been] afforded. As for those who have, childhood could equally seem a stifling imposition of obedience to undeserved authority, selectively preserved ignorance, and caged vulnerability.⁶

Perry Nodelman’s argument that the concept of childhood is adult imperialistic supports Susan Honeyman’s critique that children and childhood are to some extent used by adults to nostalgically recuperate their idea of an idealized childhood. He argues that children are seen as the other and are incapable of speaking for themselves. He further notes that our attempts to speak for and about children in these ways will always confirm their differences.⁷ Both Honeyman and Nodelman emphasize the problematic nature of adults re-creating children’s identities and childhood in life and in fiction, keeping them innocent, and both in varying ways critique how adults’ imperialistic attitudes toward children are attempts to control their nascent identities. Both Nodelman and Honeyman’s critiques do not extend to critiquing how the traditional genre of the white, European-American bildungsroman continues to privilege white Americans. For example, although not written for an adolescent audience, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) focuses on adolescent angst, and its bildungsroman structure—the coming of age of the adolescent hero—follows the genre’s decidedly European and andocentric tendencies.⁸ However, while most novels in the recent past complicate the strict gender roles of boys and girls, especially girls, and incorporate family or social issues that children or teenagers may go through, such as bullying, divorce, racism, etc., the novels continue to retain the very specific linear identity of the bildungsroman genre with its movement toward adulthood for young boys and girls.

In 1965, Nancy Larrick’s influential article, The All White World of Children’s Literature, called attention to the lack of people of color in books for children. Out of more than 5,000 books for children published in 1962, 1963, and 1964, only 349 (6.7 percent) had one or more black characters. She decries the consequences of the all-white world of children’s literature to African American children, but most importantly to white children who she argues are brought up on gentle doses of racism through their books.⁹ Larrick’s article signaled the beginning of a call for multicultural children’s literature and the need to encourage and incorporate ethnic literature into the curriculum of the public schools. By the mid-1970s, books of the third wave of the Golden Age of children’s literature began to incorporate an awareness of multiculturalism as well as -ism issues, such as racism, sexism, ageism, and classism.

When children’s literature began to be published from the perspective of minorities, and the concept of multiculturalism gained traction, it became politically fraught especially within the public school systems. Katharine Capshaw Smith emphasizes how children’s literature is politicized and how adults mediate the ways that children view the stories of people of color: Because works often narrate and explain details of a traumatic past, like the internment of Japanese Americans or the enslavement of African Americans, to an audience innocent of historical knowledge, the stakes are high: adult mediators recognize the gravity of their role as gatekeepers to history and arbiters of ethnic identity.¹⁰ However, multiculturalism is not necessarily the complete answer with multiculturalism signifying merely a token representation of minority fiction. As Dolores de Manuel and Rocío G. Davis argue, in the public schools, benign myths about multiculturalism abound, such as the attitude that all children’s books about other cultures can be read as the authentic representations of those cultures, and the phenomenon of ‘tourist-multiculturalism,’ which approaches ethnic works as pleasant detours away from the main curriculum.¹¹ For example, two widely taught African American YA novels, Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) and Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 (1995), respectively focus on the historical segregation in 1930s Mississippi and the Birmingham church bombing in 1963. But because their focus is on excavating history and overt racism, if they are read as representative African American novels, such books may inadvertently imply that we are now living in a postracial society to children who encounter no other novels about African Americans in the classroom. Teaching such texts between adult texts, such as Shakespeare and other canonical writers and mainstream YA fiction, misrepresents by oversimplifying the complexity of the lives of children of color.¹²

Even though more writers of color are being published in the early twentyfirst century, especially Asian American writers, their books are often still relegated to the back burner in the public schools. And books by Asian Americans are rarely taught in the public school classrooms. When an Asian American text is chosen to be taught in a public school, it is often simply a token text, one book chosen to exemplify the various heterogeneous Asian ethnicities, so that children may be negligently given the impression that Asians comprise only one ethnicity. As a result, instead of stereotypes being dismantled, they are reinforced. Children are also implicitly, if not unintentionally, taught that the most important and defining issue for minorities is race. In the case of Asian Americans, the issue of immigration, with the divide between immigrants and native-born Asian Americans, is reinforced and emphasized. For example, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese attempts to ironically dismantle several stereotypes that Chinese Americans and Asian Americans must deal with, but because it is often taught as the only Asian American text a child encounters in school, it may effectively represent all Asian ethnicities and thus reinforce the very stereotypes it attempts to dismantle.

Caught between the Bamboo Ceiling and the Sticky Floor: Going beyond the Asian American Model Minority Stereotype

To a great extent, the model minority stereotype suppresses a very important issue that Asian Americans face, that of being the invisible minority, which causes a conundrum for Asian American teenagers. They are Asian and also not Asian, considered honorary white but at the same time not white, having the stereotype of being successful academically and in terms of their careers. Theorists have coined the terms bamboo ceiling and sticky floor to examine two major issues that adult Asian Americans face in the workplace, terms I believe can be extrapolated to help us see how Asian American children in fiction also face the same types of discrimination. The bamboo ceiling refers to a specific type of workplace discrimination that Asian Americans often face. In Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling: Career Strategies for Asians (2005), Jane Hyun extrapolates the term bamboo ceiling from the gendered term the glass ceiling to argue that while Asian Americans may be overrepresented in prestigious higher education institutions, they are less likely to achieve executive positions in their chosen career fields because they are perceived as lacking leadership, executive, and communication skills. The complementary term for bamboo ceiling is sticky floor, which refers to how young Asian professionals are trapped in low-mobility jobs, essentially pigeonholed into dead-end careers with no path for advancement. For example, in an article in Fusion, a web-based magazine, Tim Hwang, an entrepreneur and the CEO of a start-up company, argues that although Asian Americans make up almost half of the workers in the tech industry (Silicon Valley), they are in the single digits in upper management or as CEOs of companies.¹³

Why do overachieving Asians face barriers to climbing the corporate ladder? In many ways, the terms bamboo ceiling and sticky floor exemplify the subtle racism that Asian Americans, both adults and children, face because of the supposedly positive model minority myth. In her book, Jane Hyun relates an anecdote in which Jino Ahn, president of an Asian American organization, was attending a diversity conference and noticed that there were no breakout sessions focusing on Asian Americans. When he asked about this absence at one session, a panelist replied, Is there a need for this? I thought Asians are doing better than the whites! Why in the world would they need any more help?¹⁴ The pervasive model minority stereotype of Asian Americans’ high academic achievements reinforces the belief that Asian Americans do not experience racism or discrimination because they have assimilated into white mainstream culture. It also suggests that Asian Americans are on a par with whites in terms of their academic achievement, or, as the above quote suggests, may even have outstripped whites. Whites fear that Asian Americans have out-whited them by dominating prestigious and traditionally white fields, such as medicine, engineering, and computer science.

Asian Americans are also often used as a positive example to criticize other minorities, such as African Americans and Latinos. Cultural critic David Leiwei Li argues that in the model minority discourse, the Asian American is incorporated into the narrative of European assimilation to serve two primary functions: first, to reaffirm the validity of the American democratic promise that other minorities of color have collectively failed to take advantage of; and second, to erase the repetitive historical differentiations of citizenship between white ethnicities and people of color.¹⁵

To some extent, mainstream society’s celebration of Asian American assimilation, of becoming culturally white or honorary white, of erasing differences, points to a very real paradox that Asian American children and teenagers face, a paradox often faced by the fictional characters in the books analyzed in this collection: the reality does not reflect the myth. The model minority stereotype or myth glosses over the fact that Asian American is not one race or nationality but is comprised of heterogeneous nationalities, races, and classes and includes both recent immigrants and citizens born in the United States. Adults, and especially children and teenagers, may straddle multiple interstitial spaces so that the model minority stereotype often belies their complex lived experiences and racialized designations, especially their experiences of crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial borders to negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American identity. For the second-generation, and even for the first-generation, children in the process of assimilating into American culture, mainstream society appears to see their race as not just part of their identity but as being their only identity; in a sense then, race goes before individual identity. Many of the chapters in this book point to how the main characters in different novels attempt to negotiate this conundrum, which is experienced not just by Asian Americans but also by other minorities. As the bildungsroman nature of YA fiction suggests, for the Asian American teenager, as well as for other teenagers, race and ethnicity are only one part of their individual identity. The focus for many of them is coming to terms with issues that affect their individualized and unique selves within the private space of family and within the larger public spaces of their community, for example, bullying or the death of a family member. Identity assimilation is not based on the simplistic either–or suggested by the pejorative terms of banana or coconut (i.e., yellow or brown on the outside, white on the inside), but instead points to how complex interstitial identities interrogate issues of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiculturalism. Focusing on Asian American adults in the workplace, the bamboo ceiling and sticky floor tropes contradict the belief that there is such a thing as Asian privilege on a par with white privilege and exemplify how Asian American adults as well as children are compartmentalized or stereotyped into certain niches, such as the nerdy computer genius or exoticized, petite young girl. Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction emphasizes how fictional children of various Asian ethnic groups succeed or fail to succeed according to mainstream norms and how they either come to terms with such success or failure or create their own uniquely blended and interstitial selfhood and place within the larger mainstream and their own ethnic societies.

The early twentieth-century Asian stereotype of the effeminized but threatening Asian male representing the yellow peril in such novels and films as the Fu Manchu novels (1913-59) and films and the female as a dangerous dragon lady in the Terry and the Pirates cartoon strips (1934-46) or the self-sacrificing Madame Butterfly figure in the opera Madame Butterfly (1904) are still promulgated in mainstream media. The growing Asian American male teenager needs to negotiate these images, which have now evolved into the ubiquitous white leading man’s bumbling and nerdy Asian(American)side-kick friend, or the emasculated, robot-like computer nerd. Asian and Asian American women continue to be portrayed as petite, exoticized young girls, the lotus blossom figure, the self-sacrificing Madame Butterfly figure, or the erotic and dangerous dragon lady figure in spy and gangster movies. Discussing these stereotypes, media critics Kent A. Ono and Vincent N. Pham argue that Asian and Asian American women are constructed both as sexual objects and as lacking power; indeed, the lack of power is intrinsic to the representation of sexual desirability.¹⁶ Asian American males are also constructed as lacking any power and authority in society and, unlike the women, also lack any sexual desirability. The early twentieth-century yellow peril images have been transformed, but they still posit the Asian American as an alien other and a perpetual foreigner.

Not only are Asian Americans invisible within society culturally, politically, and economically, but they are frequently made to feel like foreigners in the country of their birth, the United States. They try to be American and assimilate, but they are forced to recognize that they are not always accepted as such. When Nina Davuluri won the Miss America pageant in 2013, Twitter and other social media sites lit up with racist comments—that she is not American because she is not white, black, or even Asian but rather brown and looked like a Muslim, probably the most vilified ethnicity in the United States.¹⁷ The title of Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese, acknowledges the quicksand that Asian Americans constantly feel they are treading, the belief that they do not belong in the United States and do not have the status of being native born or American.

King-Kok Cheung points to the frustrations felt by native-born Asian Americans at being treated as perpetual foreigners.¹⁸ Cheung further argues that this has created an internal ambivalence about their Asian heritage,¹⁹ as well as a two-tiered system between the native born, the second generation, and the immigrant. As a result, native-born Asian Americans may be positioned in opposition to immigrants they consider fresh off the boat (FOB), those who are not assimilated, and feel like they need to distance themselves from the FOB immigrants to be accepted as authentically native-born Asian American by mainstream society. Growing adolescents may feel that they are not authentically Chinese, Taiwanese, Indian, or Pakistani. Cultural critic Lisa Lowe gives an example from a short story about two Chinese American girls from similar backgrounds in which each believes that the other is more authentically Chinese. Lowe posits that culture is transmitted in multiple ways and argues that the ways in which it is imagined, practiced, and continued … is worked out as much ‘horizontally’ among communities [or individuals] as it is transmitted ‘vertically’ in unchanging forms from one generation to the next.²⁰ Although Lowe’s belief that vertical transmission of culture is unchanging is a bit simplistic, her idea of horizontal transmission of ethnic culture in a multicultural society speaks to the conflicts, ambivalence, and recuperation of the adolescent’s ethnic culture that second- or multiple-generation adolescents experience as they negotiate and rebel against not only the mainstream culture, but also their immigrant parents and grandparents and their Old World attitudes. Such conflicts can also engender an internal ambivalence or self-hatred, which is illustrated by American Born Chinese’s main character, who transforms himself into Dennis, a white guy. Such a transformation speaks to the fragmentation of identities with which the Asian American adolescent must contend, but it also shows the complexity of his constantly reconfigured interstitial identity.

Asian children’s Americanness belies the fact that their families’ loyalties may be divided between the United States and the countries of their origin (their homelands). This is definitely true for the 1.5 immigrant children, but also true for the second-generation American-born children who may feel that they are divided between their parents’ native culture, the past, and assimilating into American society, the future. Most YA Asian American novels feature a plot structure in which the 1.5-generation and the secondgeneration children realize that they do not need to reject their parents’ native culture to embrace American society, but that both cultures can be synthesized within themselves to make their unique selves.

But even as the children look into the future, they must also deal with a past that continually moves into the present. Several chapters in Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focus on this issue. Linda Pierce Allen’s chapter describes the personal family struggles of two Filipino immigrant brothers as they attempt to assimilate into American culture; Traise Yamamoto’s chapter discusses Japanese American children dealing with the Japanese internment; and Hena Ahmad’s chapter features South Asian teenagers who are personally affected by 9/11 due to their race and ethnicity. Stuart Hall suggests that cultural identity is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history, and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories.²¹ Hall’s focus on the dynamic nature of cultural identity and his argument that individual identity is located in a given time and place, within history, point to the complexities that individuals face within their ethnic communities and larger mainstream society. For example, many Asians in the United States are foreign born, and Asian illegal immigration is an unstated issue ignored by politicians and the larger public, who focus primarily on undocumented Latinos. Asian Americans made up 5.6 percent of the American population in 2010;²² according to the Department of Homeland Security, of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States 1.3 million of them are Asian.²³ In 2012, 45 percent of Latino immigrants were undocumented compared to 13 percent of Asian immigrants, but Asian legal and illegal immigration was outpacing Latino immigration.²⁴ One of the most visible undocumented immigrants is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, originally from the Philippines. With the political focus on Latino illegal immigration, Asian American illegal immigration continues to be marginalized and ignored by mainstream media. Unlike Caucasians or African Americans, who are implicitly regarded as Americans, Asian American children, in real life and in fiction, may experience childhood as a site of transnational encounters fraught with anxiety, tension, and frustration.

Coming of Age as American and Asian

Thematically, Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction attempts to articulate not just an Asian American identity, but also a more localized, interstitial Asian identity that more accurately reflects the complex identities of teenagers living in a globalized and multicultural society. Dolores de Manuel and Rocío G. Davis note that second- and multiple-generation Asian American writers, having lived the model minority stereotype, now in their work "reposition themselves as central to the American experience rather than peripheral. More importantly,