Sun Yung Shin is a 2007 Bush Artist Fellow for Literature and author of the collection of poems Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press, 2007), which was awarded the Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. She was also co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writings on Transracial Adoption (South End Press, 2006) and is the author of Cooper’s Lesson (Children's Book Press, 2004), a bilingual Korean/English picture book for children. She lives in Minneapolis, Minesota. For more information, visit her website.

I never thought I would grow up to be a writer. As a child I loved to read, and it rarely occurred to me that the children I read about did not look like me, or rather, that I didn’t look like them. The English language was a common home. As I got older I grew more conscious of the paucity of images of Asian American girls and children in all the written material that surrounded me, that surrounded all Americans. I wasn’t to be found on television, in movies, on billboards, in ads, in books. In groups of African American and white children, I stood out. I was both hyper-visible and invisible. I existed in my body but not in general history, not in everyday words, not in mainstream images.

One of the few books I had was a small red book from Tuttle Publishing. The book is long gone but I remember it well. It contained Korean folktales about tigers, bridegrooms, and shamans. The girls were pure, good, and self-sacrificing and the young men were poor-but-noble. The universe had a rather strict moral order. In that book, the people weren’t “Asian,” (or “Oriental”) they were “the princess” or “the woodcutter” or “the brother and sister.” When inhabiting that imaginative space, I, the reader, had no “race” and no nationality - I was just a reader, just me, merging with those worlds.

Stories from that book and other books of fairy tales, folk tales, and myths - from all over the world - continue, for me, to illuminate the dark and beautiful world of childhood. It is a world that never leaves us, that lives on within us, even if we don’t honor the intensity, the grief, the life we lived as a child.

Korea, my homeland, my motherland, seemed impossibly distant then. From the age of one to the age of twelve, I did not set foot back upon the Korean peninsula. During that period of uneasy and incomplete assimilation, I was in a kind of wilderness. The Korean folktales did not narrate my life story - did not contain images of civil war, Protestant missionaries, American nurses, US soldiers, Yankee camptowns, biracial children, abandoned women, separated families, crippling poverty, a nation divided and occupied…

Though I didn’t identify with Dorothy, Alice, or Wendy’s race, I identified with their being thrown into strange and sometimes hostile worlds, unable to get home without the aid of magic. Seoul, my birth city, seemed as unreachable and unknowable as the Emerald City. I could not picture it. I could neither hear nor smell it. My American adoptive parents were as Midwestern-white (Irish, German, Polish) Catholic-from-working-class Chicago-now-lower middle-class as they could be. Anything west of Wisconsin and east of Gary, Indiana was pretty much irrelevant.

In high school, in college, and after college I experienced a common phase in adoptee identity development - I “found” my Asian American / Korean American / adoptee identity. I began to read about Korean history, Asian immigration history, the stories of Asian American civil rights struggles. I read literature by Asian Americans - real, living people, not anonymous paper-cut-outs from folktales set in no particular time or place. I embraced the solidarity-building political identity of “person of color” in addition to my ethnic and racial identities.

When I became a mother to my first child, a daughter, I could find almost no books that reflected her identity as a “hapa” or mixed-race / Asian American and European American child. There were a few, but they did not focus on the challenges multiracial children can face regarding such bedrock issues as language, physiognomy, class, immigration status, and generational differences. Most books featuring Asian-ethnic children were in the “food, folktales, and festivals” category. And of course there were books by white authors with racist depictions or stereotypical caricature-esque illustrations (for example, Ping - Chinese people are not actually the same yellow as a daisy…). No books really dealt with the problematic categories of race and how being biracial was in and of itself often perceived as a kind of transgression.

When I wrote Cooper’s Lesson I had so many ambitions, so many problems to solve. But I fell short of every single one of my goals. I struggled with the idea that children’s books have to have a happy ending; that the child protagonist has to solve a problem on her or his own; that these books are supposed to empower children, not depress them, even if the topic is difficult (death, divorce, homelessness). I struggled with these issues because, as an adult, I struggle to empower myself in a world full of racism and sexism.

As an adoptee author, I very much want to write a children’s book about an adoptee protagonist in which she or he struggles with the facts and nature of her or his adoption. It’s a topic - or network of topics - that does not lend itself to simple plotlines or, for me, at least, happy endings. Adoption is a not an issue that the adoptee can "solve." There are sub-issues that can be better and more directly addressed by the adoptee him/herself - ways that the he/she can take charge and transform situations, to some degree. However, as parents are the main purchasers of books, it follows that most adoptive parents don’t want to read a book that focuses on the grief of the adoptee, the grief of the birth parent, the imbalance of power and resources that is often the case between birth parent(s) and adoptive parents - especially in the case of transnational adoptions, and often in the case of transracial adoptions.

Most children’s books about adoption that I have read focus on the choice of the adoptive mother, and how the adoptee and the adoptive parents are “meant to be together,” which implies that the child and the birth family are not meant to be together. This logic, while soothing to adoptive families and to the child as a young one, grows thin and problematic as the child moves into adulthood.

Now that my children are twelve and eight, I've had well over a decade to look for good books with mixed-race Asian American characters, or even "mono-racial" Asian American characters, who deal with contemporary issues of racism, and not just with problems centered around having an Asian name, which seemed to be a popular topic for a while. It remains difficult to find books that satisfy my own experience of racism against Asian Americans, though: an experience which is far more complex than the existence of racial slurs or bullying on the basis of "almond eyes" or a "foreign-sounding" name.

One book that succeeds in portraying some of these complexities is Smoky Night by Eve Bunting - not in small part because it is not about being "raced" in relation to whiteness. The book features an African American boy and his family, and a Korean American woman during 'Sa-I-Gu', or April 29th, the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. Although this event was not part of my direct experience or the direct experience of my children (who were born in 1997 and 2000), it is an important part of Korean American--and American--history. This is the kind of book we need more of.

For my daughter's last birthday, when she turned twelve, I gave her the book Part Asian, 100% Hapa by photographer Kip Fulbeck, himself a "hapa." She sat and poured over each picture and accompanying self description. We looked at each photograph together and she could compare herself to each image - reveling in seeing so many variations on the hapa theme. As my children grow up in a much more multiracial community and nation than I did, I always have to check myself - am I projecting my obsolete anxieties onto them? Because I also teach high school, I am in constant contact with older adolescents - who now, at the age of 17, are half my age. They don't remember much about 9-11; most of them have yet to vote for the first time. The white students have grown up being taught (mostly by white people) that racism is generally a thing of the past. They are typically shocked to find out that people of color "still" experience structural racism at every level of society. In Minnesota, where I live, for instance, we have the largest wealth gap between blacks and whites in the country, and yet, if asked, most white Minnesotans would not name racism as one of the most critical problems in our state.

Literature has always played an important role in giving voice to non-official histories, but the subjectivities of people of color have not yet been given the same "airtime" as those of white people. And, no, our stories are not mostly, or even essentially, about victimhood or oppression or marginalization, as some seem to believe. What I and every other writer of color want is to be represented on our own terms: not as multicultural window dressing for white character's redemption or personal growth, but as protagonists of our own stories: stories that are as inclusive and as varied as any other group's.

Posted April 2008