‘The Seeds You Plant Now Will Flower Many Years Later’
Author and creative writing professor Marie Myung-Ok Lee reflects on building the future you wish to see for yourself
With the seemingly endless reel of anti-Asian violence appearing on the news, of which the horrific murders of six Asian American women was just one particularly horrible incident, one wonders, thinking of the endless press of racism starting with 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act, how or if anti-Asian racism will ever change.
Actually: Change starts with you.
The seeds that you plant now will flower many years later; you might not even live to see the change. But it will be there.
Book critic types say that my young adult novel, Finding My Voice, was the first contemporary set Asian American young adult novel. I am not a historian of books, but I can guess that before it was published in 1992, nearly 30 years ago, young readers did not encounter the derogatory and triggering “c” word in print. Maybe they, like me, never saw Asian American faces on book covers, except maybe for Farewell to Manzanar, which is an Asian Asian story written by a white man. Or maybe The Good Earth, an Asian story set in Asia written by a white woman, where the Asian character was later played in yellowface by…
