Ellen Oh Wants Kids to See What She Didn’t: Strong Asian American Characters in Books
The co-founder of We Need Diverse Books explains how positive diversity in children’s books counters the narrative of racism
The first time I realized a book could be racist I was in the second grade. My teacher had read The Five Chinese Brothers and something about that book bothered me, but my seven-year-old self couldn’t figure out what it was. Until recess. Several kids in my class started chasing me around pulling their eyes into slits as they shouted “Me Chinese, me play joke, me put pee pee in your coke.” In art class, the boy next to me painted my arm mustard yellow because he said I was the wrong color for a Chinaman. I didn’t tell my teacher. Why would I? She was the one who read the racist book to us in the first place. I learned to become ashamed of who I was.
As a Gen Xer, I couldn’t find any children’s books about the Asian American experience in any positive way until I was older. When I had children, I found it had only gotten marginally better. And while I was happy my children had Linda Sue Park, Grace Lin, Lisa Yee, there just wasn’t enough. It’s why I started writing children’s books. I wanted my children, and children like them to have books they could call their own, heroes that looked like them. Something I didn’t have myself. An Asian girl who could be the hero of her own story. It took me more than 10 years, but my first book was published in 2013. That year, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which gathers statistics on diversity in children’s books, put out their numbers for the previous year.
In 2012, out of 3,600 children’s books published, less than 7% of books published were about children of color. And only 2% were about AAPI. And while the numbers were shocking, they were not a surprise to any BIPOC. This had been our reality for far too long.
The year my first book came out, there were 3,200 books published in children’s literature in 2013. My book was one of only 18 books written about an Asian character.
Lee and Low, a multicultural children’s book publisher, showed that from 1994 to 2014, the number of racially diverse books hovered at around 10% for 20 years. But in 2014 and later, the numbers began to creep up. That increase correlates with the formation of We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing diversity in children’s literature.
As a cofounder of WNDB, I believe that children’s books teach empathy. Children have the capacity for empathy but they are not born empathetic. They must learn it through education and real life experiences. Books are an important part of that learning experience. And there is no doubt in my mind that the very lack of positive diversity in children’s books in the past correlates with the rampant racism, hate, and bias that we see in our world every single day. Because racism is systemic, and without anything to counter the narrative, it grows unchecked.
Publishing diverse books with positive representation is a way to counter the narrative of racism, but it is not enough. They must be taught in schools, included in curriculum, supported by administration, protected from censorship attacks. Our children must have the ability to learn anti-racism because diversity is good for everyone. It is why Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s theory of mirrors, windows, and sliding doors is so important. Children not only need mirrors to see themselves represented in books, but they need to look into windows and walk through sliding doors to see and learn about experiences and lives different from their own. This is the importance of children’s books. They are a powerful weapon against racism and hate.
However, not all diverse books are good books. One of the most popular, award-winning, bestselling YA books that has a Korean main character was written by a white author and is also quite racist. It perpetuates the harmful myth that Asians hate how they look and wish they were white. I loathe this book with all of my heart. But there it is, a perennial bestseller perpetuating a horrifying stereotype against Asians. And because it is an award-winning young adult book geared to a teen audience, it is all the more harmful. If white kids believe a stereotype that Asians hate themselves and want to be white, how will that affect their view of Asians? If Asian kids, already suffering from racism and bullying, read a popular book about an Asian kid wanting to be white, how will that affect their self-worth? This is how anti-Asian sentiment is perpetuated. One racist, award-winning book at a time. Oh, and I hear they are going to make a movie, too. Please don’t. We don’t need another racist Asian stereotype on the big screen. There are so many already to choose from.
Instead, let’s highlight the amazing literature Asian American writers are publishing and how diverse our experiences are! From Linda Sue Park’s ode to Little House on the Prairie, Prairie Lotus, to Lyla Lee’s Kpop competition novel I’ll Be The One, to Gracie Kim’s epic fantasy The Last Fallen Star, Korean American children’s books have come so far from when I hunted endlessly to find myself in the pages of a book. I know that I would have loved to have read Robin Ha’s Almost American Girl, Hena Khan’s More to the Story, Christina Soontornvat’s A Wish in the Dark. And instead of that horrible Five Chinese Brothers books, what I would have given to have had Joanna Ho’s Eyes That Kiss In the Corners or Minh Le’s Drawn Together. The very breadth of new Asian American books out now is something to be celebrated. Stacey Lee’s Luck of the Titanic, Sarah Kuhn’s From Little Tokyo With Love, Loan Le’s A Pho Love Story, Anuradha D. Rajurkar’s American Betiya, Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar, and Malinda Lo’s brilliant Last Night at the Telegraph Club, to name a few. And there’s so much more coming that I’m so excited about like Katie Zhao’s How We Fall Apart, Misa Sigura’s Love and Other Natural Disasters, and Axie Oh’s The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea (with the most glorious book cover ever!).
But this change was a long time coming. The reality is that for a very long time Asians in American literature and media were either invisible or a stereotype. Our own stories whitewashed or told via a white lens. Without positive representations of Asians, racism wins. Now, we can no longer afford to stay silent. There is actual real harm that happens when we turn a blind eye to racism. They say that hate crimes against Asians rose by 150%. I say that number is too low. Our community doesn’t tend to report all that happens to us. In fact, most people in our various communities don’t trust the police. Too many times have our concerns been ignored and our broken English mocked. We can no longer be invisible. The most vulnerable of us, our elderly, are being violently attacked and killed. Our communities live in daily fear.
When I look at the story of my life, my timeline with its ups and downs, with moments of profound happiness and terrible sadness, it is also overwhelmingly full of moments of racism. From acts of violent racism, when I was 10 years old and spit on and beaten up by a group of teens calling me a chink, to microaggressions like the partner at my first law firm asking me if I was a North Korean commie or the more acceptable South Korean, to so many moments of casual racism. Do you eat dog? Slitty eyed bitch. Oh me so horny. Do you speak English? Kung flu carrier. But the number of times I have been told to go home to where I truly belong, because I can’t possibly be a real American, is far too numerous to count. If every instance was represented by the color red, my timeline would be awash in a bloody sea of the pain each moment has given me. They have scarred my very soul.
Racism is systemic. There is no one fix. There is no easy answer. And until American society as a whole recognizes how deeply rooted it is in all aspects of life and works to actively solve this problem, it will never go away. But there are tools that we can use to fight it. Positive representation of BIPOC communities in books and media can help our future generations learn not to think of us as the “other.” As unequal. And just maybe, as we change the minds of our young, we can change the trajectory of racism in the future. Perhaps it is naïve. Perhaps too optimistic. But what I want more than anything is to hope that my future timeline, and those of my children, won’t be covered with the scars of racism anymore.
