Complicating Culture and Difference: Situating Asian American Youth Identities in Lisa Yee’s Millicent Min, Girl Genius and Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time

Abstract

This review situates how culture, difference, and identity are discursively constructed in Millicent Min, Girl Genius and Stanford Wong Flunks BigTime, two award-winning books written by critically acclaimed Asian American author Lisa Yee. Using contextual literacy approaches, the characters, cultural motifs, and physical settings in these texts are deconstructed to explore the nuances of Asian American youth identities that intersect along the lines of class, gender, and race. This review ends by offering teaching strategies for explicating Asian American young adult literature to critically investigate the representations of Asian American counter-narratives, experiences, and youth cultures.Keywords Asian American Á Asian American young adult literature Á Chinese American Á Multicultural literature Á Representations Works written by Asian American authors have gained increasing prominence in the canon of multicultural literature for children and youth. American readers of all backgrounds may be most familiar with canonical texts of historical fiction and nonfiction written by critically acclaimed Asian American authors of Chinese and Japanese ancestry. For example, many of Laurence Yep's works focus on how early Chinese laborers coped with anti-Asian racism and the contradictions of unequal citizenship. In Dragonwings (1977), a Yep classic that has won multiple awards including the prestigious Newbery Honor, the reader is introduced to a Chinese

Mis/Representations of Asian/Americans in the Curricula: Perspectives from Second-Generation Japanese American Youth

“…Chin (1991) and other Asian American male scholars have been outspoken critics of popular Asian American women writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan for representing Asian American men according to what they see as racist stereotypes. While the intent is not to encourage the removal of books like The Joy Luck Club from any reading lists, Naomi's teacher could have benefited from researching the debates pertaining to issues of Asian American literary representations to help students understand the multiple debates and viewpoints surrounding these contentious issues (Endo, 2009). Finally, while Asian Americans across ethnic groups share several common experiences, primarily in terms of being lumped together and racialized (Espiritu, 1993), Lee (2005) reminds us that "the diversity of the Asian American category makes it impossible to talk about a single Asian American culture, identity, or experience" (p. 17).…”