Asian American Autobiography for Children: Critical Paradigms and Creative Practice

Abstract

This essay explores exercises in life writing for children by reading several Asian American autobiographies, to analyze their authors' purposes and factor them as part of a dynamic network of creative writing. Reading these autobiographies critically unveils the writers' strategies of meaning and their significance in the intersecting contexts of Asian American children's literature and genre studies. The texts offer diverse examples of the lives of young Asian or Asian American subjects whose experiences attest to the diversity of the classification "Asian American." The analysis covers a range of texts: some center on pre-immigration life, others on growing up as a minority person in America, others on war and internment, and some on urban life in the United States. This diversity proposes a range of experiences that allow the child reader, particularly the Asian American child, to learn about the possibilities of ethnic experience.

How the Reader Matters. Autobiographies of Childhood for Young Readers

“…, and small-scale studies on ethnic autobiographies for young readers (Davis 2002, 2006. 3 After the first book, she wrote seven more.…”

Achieving a Shared Understanding of Life. Artists’ reflections on their constructions of the past and the self in traumatic and nostalgic autobiographical picturebooks

“…1 all of these examples are predominantly textual books, though the cartoons by ellen forney in Sherman alexie's book, for instance, strongly contribute to the story. Whereas life writing in text has been the object of children's literature studies (Van lierop 1997;lathey 1999;Davis 2003Davis , 2006Kokkola 2003), much less attention has been paid to multimodal life writing in children's literature, that is: life writing through both text and images. articles by lathey (2003) and Kümmerling-Meibauer (2010) are two of the few exceptions.…”