Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction ed. by Ymitri Mathison (review)

Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction, edited by Ymitri Mathison, features ten essays that consider how a variety of YA novels by Asian American authors "go beyond the stereotypes that Asian American children and adults face . . . by depicting how their characters define their unique identities within both mainstream society and their ethnic communities and families" (Mathison 3–4). As Mathison asserts, "such identity work is not new"; even so, she contends that focusing exclusively on how such identity work is taken up in YA novels by Asian American authors and featuring Asian American adolescents certainly is (4). As such, Mathison's collection is an important book because it highlights a growing body of fiction that reflects the complexity and diversity of Asian American young people. The collection's emphasis on characters' lived experiences brings to the forefront actual Asian American teens' experiences in identity construction and navigating white supremacist U.S. culture.

Matthison's introduction succinctly lays out the collection's purpose by posing two significant questions: "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?" (3). In considering these questions, Mathison and her contributors point to the various identities Asian American adolescents must negotiate and the resulting interstitiality, or "the process of in-betweenness" (5), that many feel. By focusing on the theme of interstitiality, the essays each assert that there is "not just an Asian American identity, but also a more localized interstitial 'Asian' identity" that demonstrates the multifaceted identities of teens, who live in a "globalized and multicultural society" (13). To this end, the essays assert that there is no singular way to be an Asian American teen; thus, the collection directly challenges the stereotype of Asian Americans as the model minority while also recognizing the ways Asian Americans generally and Asian American teens specifically must negotiate this status.

Particularly strong is the collection's first essay, "The Monkey and the Colonoscopy Machine: On the Destruction of Racism and Stereotype in Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese and Level Up" by Tomo Hattori. The essay considers how Yang's popular graphic novels provides readers with a way to let go of internalized racism. By deconstructing a pervasive racism idiom (that of the monkey) and developing "new idioms of Asian belonging in America" (represented by the colonoscopy machine) (25), both of Yang's novels, Hattori argues, help Asian American teens challenge "internalized racism through powerfully articulated destructions of stereotypes" (24). Hattori develops a carefully constructed theoretical reading of Yang's texts, ultimately asserting that these novels thoughtfully consider "racial subject formation" (37).

The majority of the essays focus on the theme of interstitiality, which the collection's editor defines as "the process of in-betweenness" (Mathison 5). For example, in "Consuming Vietnamese America One Bite at a Time: Stealing Buddha's Dinner and Inside Out & Back Again," Lan Dong argues that these texts, both of which feature female protagonists who were displaced from Vietnam as children and subsequently grew up in the United States, chronicle the protagonists' in-between moments to consider how they negotiate "their racial interstitiality" (147), which is specifically represented through food. In focusing on food and food practices, Dong encourages readers to consider the experiences of Asian American youth beyond assimilation, as the protagonists' search for subjectivity is "intertwined with a fusion of American and ethnic foods and cultures" that reflects "a process of creolization" (148). The protagonists' search for subjectivity is then represented through the ways they experience the blending of Vietnamese and American food, enabling the narrators to understand their own identities as both Vietnamese and American.

Continuing to build on the theme of interstitiality, both Hena Ahmed and Leah Milne take up Mathison's assertion that "Asian American children, as depicted in fiction, are very adept at moving and negotiating between" multiple identities in a variety of locations and circumstances (Mathison 5). Ahmed...