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Chapter 7. The Childhood for Children: The Cultural Experience of the Early Reader

This study, which reads autobiography as a writerly project that creates a reader and enhances cultural memory, needs to consider the important role played by children’s literature. As a cultural product, autobiographical writing for children is an independent but interdependent literary artifact that can promote renewed perspectives on history and society.1 Moreover, I argue that an analysis of Asian North American life writing for children expands the paradigms of research in Asian American autobiography. Broadening the frontiers of scholarship that critically reads ethnic autobiography, an analysis of this form of self-representation illuminates originative strategies. Katharine Capshaw Smith asserts that “children’s literature allows readers a means to reconceptualize their relationship to ethnic and national identities. Telling stories to a young audience becomes a conduit for social and political revolution” (3). Tracing the evolution of ethnic children’s literature in the last two or three decades, one notes the way literature functions as a cultural product that reflects and shapes the cultures of those who live it—and the way that “consumers ” or beneficiaries can in turn play a role in the production culture’s literary artifacts (Carpenter 53). Children’s literature, moreover, is evaluated by a multiple audience, which includes adults involved in education—teachers and librarians—as well as parents who supervise their children’s reading. This literature “becomes a particularly intense site of ideological and political contest, for various groups of adults struggle over which versions of ethnic identity will become institutionalized in school, home, and library settings” (Katharine Capshaw Smith 3). An Asian North American author of an autobiography for children makes us rethink the role of life writing within the context of identity formation, reconfiguring the genre with insurgent possibilities. Asian North American children’s literature highlights the value that society attributes to history, national and ethnic affiliation, intercultural relationships , and communities. The target audiences of these texts—“mainstream” 156 The Childhood for Children The Cultural Experience of the Early Reader q • Chapter 7 and “ethnic” children—are addressed in doubled ways: Asian North American children, for example, would be encouraged by the authors to resist “pejorative categorizations by asking the reader to reimagine herself, to identify herself with the text’s cultural models”; readers from other ethnic groups would be encouraged to overcome prejudice and stereotypes through crosscultural understanding (Katharine Capshaw Smith 4). For these children today, issues of history, heritage, peer communities—cultural and scholastic—and the possibility (or imperative) of self-formation serve as impetus for processes of empowerment and agency. As Carole Carpenter argues, the most successful children’s books reject the assumption that children are merely receivers of culture , presenting them as “creative manipulators of a dynamic network of concepts , actions, feelings and products that mirror and mold their experience as children” (57). Though children’s existence and experience as cultural beings must be negotiated critically by readers, meaning in effective literary texts lies, at least in part, through the traditions and experience of collective children’s culture that each of them experiences individually (Carpenter 56). By addressing children generally, the narratives also admit reflection on multiple claims of identity that many young Americans and Canadians encounter. Meaning arises, therefore, from the text’s involvement with the nature of childhood, more than simply with the experience of ethnicity. Nonetheless, when the network of concepts involves ethnic appreciation, autobiographical texts play operative roles in articulating the contexts within which children can enter in a process of self-formation. The evolution of recent ethnic autobiography for children has been toward historical realism and intercultural narratives that emphasize the varied cultural influences a child growing up in the United States or Canada experiences. This new historicism in children ’s literature, according to Mitzi Myers, helps “integrate text and socio-historic context, demonstrating on the one hand how extraliterary cultural formations shape literary discourse and on the other how literary practices are actions that make things happen—by shaping the psychic and moral consciousness of young readers but also by performing many more diverse kinds of cultural work, from satisfying authorial fantasies to legitimating or subverting dominant class and gender ideologies” (42). Many of these texts, for example , focus on historical events that are not taught in North American school curriculums. By incorporating historical information in autobiographies, writers not only present the events of history in ways that encourage identification and understanding, but offer all North American children perspectives on the past. The potent issue of authenticity in...