We’ve recently posted our celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month to the PaperTigers website (click now or click later, but do hop on over and enjoy the new features) and, as usual, we had more material then we could fit into the update. So here are some additional thoughts for you to mull over:
I found interesting words by authors Linda Sue Park and Laurence Yep pointing to an intersection, so to speak, between fantasy/science fiction and multicultural literature. And the idea that the themes and scenarios explored in some science fiction books might resonate with immigrant and biracial children is an intriguing one…
In a video interview to Reading rockets, Laurence Yep speaks of “adapting to different realities” in a time when books reflecting his own experiences didn’t exist:
I lived in an Afro-American neighborhood and went to school in Chinatown. So the books that I really found true to my own life were fantasy and science-fiction, because in those books you have children from an ordinary world or ordinary place taken to another world, where they have to learn strange, new customs and a strange, new language. Those books talked about adapting, and that was something I did every time I got on and off the bus.
And Linda Sue Park says, in her answer to a question from Cynthia Leitich Smith about the lack of non-white protagonists in fantasy and science fiction:
Fantasy and science fiction generally posit the protagonist as an “other,” amid races and species that are not of this world. Some writers whose lives are lived as part of the majority might feel that they have to leave the real world, as it were, in order to place their characters in environs of alienation. But writers of color don’t need to do that–we’ve got plenty of alienation right here (…). As we continue to get more comfortable in the mainstream of both life and literature, I think we’ll start to see more characters of color in other genres. These things take time.
From a time when fantasy and science fiction about “alien worlds” were closer to home for a young Chinese American boy than the rest of the available stories, to a time when all genres, including fantasy and science fiction, feature characters of color… Now that’s something to think about and root for.