Back in the 1980s when the Hmong, a group of people indigenous to the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia, began to immigrate to the United States in significant numbers, many were resettled in western Wisconsin where I teach. I have always taken it as a given that all children should see themselves reflected in at least some of the books used in their classrooms, so it bothered me that there were so few readily available children's books concerning the Hmong, or for that matter other Southeast Asians like the Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, in our school library. Thus began my quest for good children's books about Southeast Asia and Southeast Asians.

Starting with books for the very young, I strongly recommend Minfong Ho's delightful bedtime rhyme Hush! A Thai Lullaby (Orchard, 1996). Masterfully illustrated by Holly Meade, this gem of a book, in which a Thai mother tries to quiet all of the animals on her farm because she thinks, incorrectly, that her baby is sleeping, was a Newbery Honor Book. Almost as much fun is Ho and Meade's more recent picturebook Peek! A Thai Hide-and-Seek! (Candlewick, 2004). Many Southeast Asian picture books center on the history of the region. A classic of its type is Jeanne M. Lee's Silent Lotus (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), which tells the story of a deaf Cambodian girl who becomes a famous temple dancer. Many of these historical works, however, center on the era surrounding the Vietnam War and the eventual need to immigrate to the United States and other countries.  Of particular note are Sherry Garland's The Lotus Seed (Harcourt, Brace, 1993), beautifully illustrated by Tatsuro Kiuchi, which concerns a Vietnamese child who must deal with her grandmother's great sorrow over having lost her homeland; Garland's My Father's Boat (Scholastic, 1998), in which a Vietnamese boy and his father, living as fishermen in Texas, also think about the homeland they've lost; and Michele Maria Surat's Angel Child, Dragon Child (Scholastic, 1983), which is about a young Vietnamese immigrant who must deal with the prejudice of American children. Also powerful are Pegi Deitz Shea's The Whispering Cloth (Boyds Mill, 1995), which concerns an orphaned Hmong girl living in a resettlement camp and Dia Cha's Dia's Story Cloth (Lee & Low, 1996), which relates the entire history of the Hmong people by combining text with beautiful Hmong pa'ndau needlework.

The people of Southeast Asia have wonderful storytelling traditions and this has been reflected in recent years in the proliferation of well-done picture books featuring a variety of folktales.  Among the best are various retellings of the Cinderella story, including Jewell Reinhart Coburn's  Angkat: The Cambodian Cinderella (Shen, 1998), delicately illustrated by Eddie Flotte, which complicates the traditional tale by adding a reincarnation theme, and Coburn and Tzexa Cherta Lee's Jouanah: A Hmong Cinderella (Shen, 1996), which begins with Jouanah's mother voluntarily being turned into a cow by her father in order to help with the planting. When the father refuses to change her back into a woman, the mother commits suicide, but then returns as a spirit to help Jouanah triumph over her wicked stepmother. Other fine examples of Southeast Asian folktales include Blia Xiong's Nine-in-One, Grr! Grr! (Children's Book Press, 1989), probably the first English-language Hmong children's book, and still one of the best, which explains how Tiger was tricked into only having one baby every nine years instead of nine babies a year, and Sherry Garland's anthology, Children of the Dragon: Selected Tales from Vietnam (Harcourt, 2001), which features lovely illustrations by the great Trina Schart Hyman.

For older children there are a number of fine chapter books and novels available, most of them centered on the war era or the immigration experience. Among the best are Ho's The Clay Marble (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), which details both the horrors and the joys of life in a Cambodian refugee camp, and her recent The Stone Goddess (Scholastic, 2003), which is also about life in Cambodia;  Richard Mosher's Zazoo (Clarion, 2001), which concerns a Vietnamese girl living with her adoptive parents in France; and Shea's Tangled Threads (Clarion, 2003), which takes up the story of the little girl in The Whispering Cloth years later, when she actually has a chance to immigrate to the United States.

In the above paragraphs I've mentioned a few of my favorite children's books about the people of Southeast Asia, but there are now many more books out there.  If you have a special interest in this subject, please visit my website where you find listed a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction for children and young adults, as well as a selected bibliography of secondary materials about the topic.

posted: October 2004