Pages

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Learning about my own work

Recently, this link was shared with me (thanks so much, Susan!). It's an academic article titled, Negotiating Asian American Childhood in the Twenty-First Century: Grace Lin’s Year of the Dog, Year of the Rat, and Dumpling Days that was published in The Lion and the Unicorn. I'm quite honored! I think it's the first published academic writing about my work...this is definitely a milestone!

But not only is it a milestone,  the article is so gratifying to me as an author. It  encapsulates the things I was trying to do in my books (show that "....no Asian American child is exactly the same as another.") as well as things I hadn't thought of (Pacy's view of Audrey Chang  in Dumpling Days as a foil for that Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom book).

However, it also brought up a viewpoint of my work that I had never thought about-- the "tourist-multicultural approach to ethnicity." It is true that Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is much more popular than the Year of the Dogdo readers prefer reading about an Asian of Asia vs an Asian-American?  Something I need to mull over and think about...