My first image of a refugee came over the television in the late 60’s. A naked Vietnamese girl about my age was running from an explosion towards the camera. In her wake were more children, all screaming, all running with their arms open, reaching, reaching out to me.

In my Catholic school, we sponsored remote African children who stared out from our hallway posters, complete with a chart showing how much more money was needed to provide them with clothing and food. In fairy tale costumes, we trick-or-treated for UNICEF. We collected our pennies in our cardboard Rice Bowls during Lent. But it took that image of the Vietnamese girl to make me see behind the statistics and plaintive faces. Children just like me were suffering around the world. I couldn’t stop the wars or the famines. But I knew I had to do something more vital than collect money that went who-knows-where.

That mission reared its insistent head when I had the opportunity to visit a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand in 1989. I was on the verge of becoming a 30-year-old yuppie, and the experience changed my life, thank God. The U.S. had high-tailed it out of Saigon in 1975, but more than 100,000 hill tribe people who had come to our aid during the Vietnam War were still lingering, underfed, homeless, destitute and depressed, fourteen years later. When I left the camp, I began writing immediately – for adults, that is.  At that time, I’d only recently begun to write for children and I assumed that this shocking reality had no place in children’s literature. My first children’s book, Bungalow Fungalow, was about playing on the beach. My contemporaries were publishing stories about maple sugaring, dress-up, and talking animals.

Then someone introduced me to the work of Eve Bunting, Karen Hesse and Patricia Polacco, and I realized that books about refugees and children’s rights do belong in young readers’ hands, if you make the story personal and intimate enough. I began my contribution by educating myself about refugees, the Hmong in particular, and reaching out to Hmong in the U.S. My first effort was The Whispering Cloth – perhaps the first, certainly one of the first – fictive picture books set in a refugee camp. I followed with a Hmong novel, Tangled Threads, about the challenges “Mai” (and other refugees) experienced in coming to America; a picture book about rug slaves set in Pakistan, The Carpet Boy’s Gift, inspired by reading about Iqbal Masih; and a new novel about a former boy soldier, Abe in Arms, which was, in part, inspired by a Liberian refugee family that moved into our town.

During the Vietnam War, I wished I had books about refugees, because the TV news overwhelmed me. As a child, I couldn’t process those images: Why are the children running? Did we hurt them? I thought we were supposed to be helping them? Will the children be okay? Today, the same need is exponentially true for youngsters. They are so barraged with audio-visual stimuli that it takes literature for them to slow down, absorb, share and process what’s going on in the world. And it takes teachers and parents to initiate that process.

Violence has become casual, entertaining, ubiquitous in the U.S. In Abe in Arms, my first novel for teens, Abe comes to America as an adopted Liberian war refugee. He receives initial therapy to help him deal with the loss of his family. But the deeper he gets into the American teen culture – sexual pressure, competitive sports, violent entertainment, substance abuse – the more absurd and worthless life becomes to him. These so-called “normal” teen experiences awaken in Abe untold traumas of sexual abuse and drunken days of slaughter. He becomes dangerous to himself and to others.

Without literature like this – and trusted adults to share it with – how can kids growing up far from disaster zones become aware of the life-and-death situations their counterparts face around the world?  It is not only war, but also shattered economies and natural disasters that create refugees. But to kids tuned into the latest celebrity debacle, the earthquake in Haiti is old news, Hurricane Katrina is ancient news and the 2004 Tsunami in the Indian Ocean is etched on stone tablets. At the time of those tragedies, many schools generously and immediately responded to the call for aid. But the consequences of these events last a long time. Without books that last, how can we expect memories to last? How can we expect children to develop a lasting commitment to caring?

Look at how Greg Mortenson’s book, Three Cups of Tea (in its variously-aged formats) has mobilized America’s children to establish ongoing “Pennies for Peace” programs. Please read in books, and on the internet, how Craig Kielburger, as a 12-year-old, began “Free the Children” after reading about child labor in a newspaper. The organization has become the largest network of “children helping children” in 45 different countries. For teens, two recent books that create awareness of the refugees among us are: Gringolandia, a novel set in America and Chile by Lyn Miller-Lachmann; and Outcasts United, a nonfiction book by Warren St. John about African refugees having trouble adapting to life in Georgia.

The United States is a country of immigrants and refugees, as my books Liberty Rising and Noah Webster remind us. Of course, not every refugee wants to resettle in a new country. Most simply wish to return home or begin life in a similar, yet safe, area. For example, many Hmong have moved from their initial locations of sponsorship in the U.S. to North Carolina where they are recreating an agricultural and traditional life similar to the one they enjoyed in SE Asia. 

Books will bring these refugee stories to light and to last in children’s hearts and minds. With books in their hands, their open arms will never close.

Posted August 2010