Examining History: Representing War in Asian American Autobiographies for Children

Abstract

In the context of perspectives that acknowledge how children’s literature creates and develops cultural memory, autobiographical writing for children arguably plays a crucial role in promoting critical views on history and society. As a cultural product, autobiographical writing for children is an independent but interdependent literary artifact, and an analysis of Asian American life writing for children expands the paradigms of research in Asian American autobiography. Children’s literature, moreover, is evaluated by a multiple audience, which includes adults involved in education—teachers and librarians—as well as parents who supervise their children’s reading. As such, this literature “becomes a particularly intense site of ideological and political contest, for various groups of adults struggle over which versions of ethnic identity will become institutionalized in school, home, and library settings” (Smith 3). An Asian American author who writes autobiography for children gestures toward a necessary nuancing of the implications of life writing within the context of identity formation, and reconfigures the genre of autobiography with insurgent possibilities.