Diasporan Subjectivity and Cultural Space in Korean American Picture Books

Diasporan Subjectivity and Cultural Space in Korean AmericanPicture Books

John Stephens, Sung-Ae Lee

Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 9, Number 1, February2006, pp. 1-25 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/jaas.2006.0007

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Macquarie University (30 Oct 2013 17:17 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jaas/summary/v009/9.1stephens.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jaas/summary/v009/9.1stephens.html

1KOREAN AMERICAN PICTURE BOOKS • STEPHENS AND LEE •

DIASPORAN SUBJECTIVITY ANDCULTURAL SPACE IN KOREANAMERICAN PICTURE BOOKS

john stephens and sung-ae lee

JAAS FEBRUARY 2006 • 1–25

© THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

THE “THIRD WAVE” OF KOREAN IMMIGRATION to the United States, following

the liberalizing of National Quotas under the 1965 Hart-Celler Act,

was characterized by a significant shift in the migrant profile, in that

families immigrated as well as individuals,1 and this pattern has continued.

Consequently, the literature produced by (and about) members of the

Korean diaspora in the United States began to give expression to the

experience of children as part of a diasporan community, and has done

so particularly through the medium of picture books. Diaspora involves

not only movement across national borders, but also the experience of

crossing boundaries of race, culture, language, history, space, and time.

Because identity is conceptualized as a communicative process, for a people

living in diaspora there arises a complex and ambivalent process of

defining and articulating identity. A function of picture books for children,

as with other kinds of literary production, is to constitute social and

cultural identities by addressing the challenge to resignify established

assumptions and meanings of identity. Characteristically in these works,

neither the United States nor Korea is allowed to function as the singular

locality of identity formation, although there is significant tension between

the impulse, on the one hand, to assimilate difference to universality and,

on the other, to emphasize the social imaginary of inherited cultural

tradition and social identity.

Journal of Asian American Studies, 9.1 (2006): 1-25

Mary Botto

muse_logo

2 • JAAS • 9:1

Picture books are potentially a powerful medium for dealing with

displacement and diaspora, in that they incorporate both verbal commu-

nication and physical, visual orientations in space. This combination en-

ables them to engage directly with verbal and visual discourses of place as

a source of identity, and hence the functions of place in representations

of displacement and loss of subjectivity. As Dalia Kandioti pertinently

argues, “The nature of places (of origin or dispersal) is crucial to studies

of displacement and transition, for the migrant . . . [has] to negotiate new

ways of being in concrete spaces with specific attributes.”2 The centrality

of place to cultural understanding is further summed up in Edward S.

Casey’s observation, “Given that culture manifestly exists, it must exist

somewhere, and it exists more concretely and completely in places than

in minds or signs.”3 Further, the bodies that inhabit culture enact cultural

practices by “incorporation, habituation, and expression.”4 Children’s pic-

ture books, by virtue of their dual coding as verbal narrative and visual

evocation of situated culture, are apt to pivot on a core emotional tension

between the drive toward self-understanding and the understanding of

one’s relationship with the external world. Those books which deal with

cultural displacement depict this tension in an acute form, since the child

characters in such books are normally of an age at which children are too

young to attain a self-reflective consciousness and thence a rational un-

derstanding of the experience of displacement. The process characteristi-

cally pursued is thus one whereby emotional tension and reconciliation

form a pathway to reconstituted subjectivity and an intuitive understand-

ing of something about the self. The visual manipulation of represented

space, as distinct from depictions of place, plays a key role in communi-

cating emotional understandings which underpin the often quite simple

cerebral understanding offered by verbal text. Space thus functions as

trope, so that hard-to-express abstract concepts are linked to the physical

world, and hence a correspondence is established between the physical

world and the mental processes of characters and audiences.

Ideologically, picture books concerned in some way with crossing

cultural boundaries are inevitably embroiled in complex issues pertain-

ing to the relationship between subjectivity and multiculturalism, and to

the vexed questions around the possibilities of hybridity. Hence a narra-


tive structure involving the loss and reclaiming of subjectivity turns out

to be deeply implicated in the common metanarrative of multiculturalism,

especially the ameliorative or positive versions of this metanarrative that

prevail in children’s literature: a multicultural metanarrative becomes

embodied in a story which traces movement from difference to subjec-

tive agency, celebrates hybridity, and affirms tolerance. It seems generally

assumed in multicultural children’s books that being is not constituted

through ego-identity, although depicted characters will be shown to en-

dure subjective loss as if this were so. Displacement from one culture to

another, however, and the separation thereby from embodied culture, re-

sults in a production of difference, so that the self is now composed

through the multiplicity of processes of becoming. A tension then arises

between, on the one hand, the conventional move in children’s books to

euphoric closure both of story and theme and, on the other hand, the

possibility that in cross-cultural situations the self might be represented

in a process of continual creation, of indefinite becoming. In other words,

by conforming to “nationalist accounts of immigration and settlement

where arrival and achievement of identity with America stand as celebrated

narrative closure,”5 a narrative about losing and reclaiming a unified self

might in effect foreclose on subjective possibility.

In the bundle of books we are considering in this article, the process

of losing and reclaiming a unified self is linked to the production of posi-

tive outcomes. This bonding happens because the process is articulated

within a particular conjunction of discourse, target audience, and a

multicultural ideology that often has much in common with Critical Race

Theory.6 Children’s books are inherently caught up in an educative pur-

pose, and commonly appear in classrooms, where their function is to “al-

low young children opportunities to develop their understanding of oth-

ers, while affirming children of diverse backgrounds.”7 Authors of

children’s literature are well aware that all discourse is a form of advocacy,

and hence is readily implicated in the construction of some idea of a com-

mon good. Within the brief, linear narrative of a 32-page picture book,

whose target audience is of elementary school age, there is only limited

scope for representing the competing discourses out of which may emerge

the self-differentiation necessary to achieve subjective agency. While it is

4 • JAAS • 9:1

possible for picture book discourse to explore how a “common good”

might be constructed at the expense of a social minority, this develop-

ment occurs only rarely, and is generally confined to books pitched at the

upper age range. Allan Say’s Home of the Brave,8 for example, depicts an

adult character caught up in a time-slip nightmare which confronts a

shameful moment in American race history—the unjust internment of

Japanese Americans during World War II—and hence an operation of

power that erases identity. The narrative complexity of this book, how-

ever, makes it easy to characterize as too difficult for its target audience.

More usually, picture books are grounded within domestic scenes

and tell stories of children gradually extending the boundaries of their

experience as they engage with a wider world of school or neighborhood.

In their role as acculturating texts, such books normally invoke a loose

social constructionist perspective whereby race is a product of social

thought and relations. Thus when racist behavior is exhibited in, for ex-

ample, Sumi’s First Day of School Ever, a teacher intervenes and the of-

fender promptly reverses how he thinks about and behaves toward Sumi.

In this way, difficulties or conflicts are depicted as things that can be over-

come as characters are shown to acknowledge what Delgado and Stefancic

refer to (in a different context) as “distinctly human, higher-order traits,

such as personality, intelligence, and moral behavior.”9 Thus when a theme

involves negotiation of ethnic differences, the books consign prejudice or

ignorance to the category of things overcome. In other words, the books

are more concerned to depict a social consensus that ideally should exist,

so that the experiences of the child protagonist flow within a desirable

direction in social process.

The possibility of losing and reclaiming a unified self is explored in

picture books by focusing attention either on the importance of resignified

place, or on the possibility of developing a hybrid mentality that resignifies

the everyday. The books do this by variously depicting three themes, ei-

ther individually or in combination: a Korean child’s first experiences in

an American school;10 a child’s relationship with his or her grandmother,

where the grandmother is the bearer of a traditional culture from which

the child feels cut off;11 and displacement and alienation, in various sto-

ries metonymic of diasporic experience.12 The third group cultivates a

particularly strong character point of view, by means of first-person nar-


ration or, in Sun Yung Shin and Kim Cogan’s Cooper’s Lesson (2004),13

character focalization marked by free direct thought. One of the most

sensitive picture book interpreters of the Korean child’s experience of

diaspora, text author Soyung Pak, has dealt with each of the themes iden-

tified here in separate books,14 while Edna Coe Bercaw and Robert Hunt’s

striking Halmoni’s Day (2000) links all three within a grandmother story.15

Space and emotion are similar in that both are experienced from the

body outward, so a picture book can exploit both the text-picture inter-

action and the principles of pictorial composition to fuse the physical

and the mental. In literary and visual arts, space has long been deployed

to convey emotion, or it signifies emotion metonymically, as when the

trepidation a migrant child experiences upon entering a school classroom

both instantiates and stands for (that is, is metonymic of) the more gen-

eralized fear of negotiating a new culture, community, and nation. The

central point in perceived space is that of the human figure, and that

figure’s space is delimited by both pictorial space and represented cul-

tural phenomena. When we look at a child who is the central character in

a picture book, we view her or him as the nodal point in a field of vision,

even when she or he is formally the book’s narrator. Scholars argue that

human beings develop a sense of space from a prior knowledge of spe-

cific places,16 and the interaction between new spaces and remembered

spaces is clearly an issue in books representing cross-cultural transition

for very young audiences. The sign systems that children develop as par-

ticular sub-sets of the society into which they are being enculturated con-

stitute the text through which they identify themselves and understand

their world. It is, in short, their culture, which, in Clifford Geertz’s ac-

count in The Interpretation of Cultures, “denotes an historically transmit-

ted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited con-

ceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which [human beings]

communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and atti-

tudes toward life.”17 To cross a boundary between cultures is to be con-

fronted with a sign system with often inexplicable meanings, or layers of

meaning, where familiar reading protocols may apply only in part.

As representations of a diasporan community, the picture books origi-

nate from across the range of possible author/illustrator subject positions,

in the sense that these artists are variously adult migrants from Korea to

6 • JAAS • 9:1

the United States, adoptees from Korea, second- or third-generation Ko-

rean Americans, or not ethnically Korean at all. Such positionings suggest

a potential range of orientations of the diasporan, “minority” culture to-

wards the “dominant” culture, especially in terms of the complex issues

of universality and particularity. It seems significant that of the books

discussed here, the only characters whose physical appearance is specifi-

cally Korean are those painted by Chris K. Soentpiet for Peacebound Trains

(1996),18 and by Robert Hunt for Halmoni’s Day (2000).19 Both produce

high modality representations, much closer to photorealism than in the

majority of the books, and the authentic appearance of the characters is

owed to the artistic practice of employing appropriate models and taking

numerous reference photographs of them,20 and, in Soentpiet’s case, to a

desire for cultural accuracy and conveying a sense of the uniqueness of a

particular Asian community. Reviewers, characteristically situated within

the dominant culture, tend to try to balance notions of particularity and

universality, but value is principally ascribed to the universal. Thus, a brief

review of Peacebound Trains in the School Library Journal concludes, “Read-

ers will come away from this book with the understanding that the struggle

for peace is universal and timeless, and that sometimes sacrifices must be

made to achieve it.”21 A more striking example is the 2004 Ezra Jack Keats

New Illustrator Award winner, My Name Is Yoon.22 The thematic criteria

for the Ezra Jack Keats award pivot on a positive representation of

multiculturalism and on such goals and values as “the universal qualities

of childhood, a strong belief in family and community, and creativity and

love of learning.”23 This story of a Korean migrant child who refuses to

write her name in “English” script, but who comes to realize that “Maybe

America will be a good home . . . . Maybe different is good, too,”24 pre-

cisely addresses those criteria. To write her name differently threatens a

fragmentation of subjectivity (“My name looks happy in Korean. . . . The

symbols dance together.”),25 and so she offers signifiers of other identities

(e.g. cat, bird, cupcake) in response to her teacher’s request for her to

write her name. Her final understanding that the meaning of her name is

not altered by the script in which it is inscribed strongly asserts her sense

of subjectivity, but paradoxically seems to fold the particular into the

universal.


Certainly, one reviewer appears to be applying this understanding of

the book’s representation of “the universal qualities of childhood,” when

she describes Yoon as being “liberated from the confines of culture and

society.”26 My Name Is Yoon is the only book discussed in this paper of

which neither author nor illustrator has ethnic Korean origins, and this

distinction perhaps underpins its universalizing tendency – a likelihood

upon which David Palumbo-Liu elaborates:

Minority cultures, that is, those cultures which have been marked as

differing significantly from what is construed to be the dominant culture,

have always had a particularly problematic relationship to the concept

of the universal: the dominant has declared itself precisely as universal,

the quality of universality in turn is affirmed as the pre-requisite for

anything seeking entrance into the dominant culture. As “universal,”

the dominant erases the contingencies of time and space, history and

location, and with the same gesture elides its operations of domination,

projecting instead the appearance of being democratic. The universal

apparently knows no prejudice; it is neither harsher nor gentler to any

particular individual, community, or nation. Hence the minor, in either

begrudgingly accepting or assertively declaring its status as minor, is at

once put in the position of explaining its particularity, its difference

from the universal.27

The prize-winning illustrations of My Name Is Yoon are devoid of any

distinctively Korean elements. The art style is European (including spa-

tial arrangements reminiscent of Chagall and of Van Gogh and surreal

elements that evoke Magritte). Yoon and her parents are depicted with

generically East Asian features, although this is a trait shared by several of

the books we examined.

Because the normal modality of picture books is closer to the car-

toon than to photorealism—and hence works through exaggeration, re-

duction of detail, reduction of focus, absence of ground, flat colors, and

restricted palette28—viewers might not expect characters to be ethnically

distinctive. There are several close-up depictions of Yoon, however, all of

which are low-modality caricatures. Notably, she is always portrayed with

neither eyebrows nor eyelashes, an approach which emphasizes her elon-

gated, Asian eyes. In strong contrast, the book’s close-up of Yoon’s Cauca-

sian teacher is much higher in modality, offering a fully-represented face

8 • JAAS • 9:1

very close to the photorealistic. Normal modality (photorealism) shapes

and determines procedures for interpretation, and hence acts of inter-

pretation performed in response to lower modality representation be-

come subordinated to the higher modality, so this aspect of the book also

subordinates the minor to the dominant culture.

The structure of subordination implicit in this contrast is also appar-

ent in the organization of space in the illustrations: seven (of a total of

fifteen) include a landscape vista, such as an open doorway, a window, or

a painting on a wall. Six are depicted within the interior of Yoon’s home.

These scenes are distinctively European, with the palette and the repre-

sented flora and skyscapes reminiscent of the landscape tradition that

goes back to Claude Lorrain.29 The apparent function of these vistas is to

represent possibility and liberation from the confines of specific culture,

and so as long as Yoon is positioned facing away from these vistas, she is

depicted as clinging to a culture of limited possibility. This particular spa-

tial effect is emphasized by two further elements. First, scenes set within

Yoon’s house employ a version of conventional Eastern planar perspec-

tive, rather than Western single-point perspective, as is employed by con-

trast in scenes set in the schoolroom. As the planes depicting a scene in

Yoon’s house recede from the reader’s viewing point, the final plane is

thus always a Western landscape. Second, the house of Yoon’s family gen-

erally lacks Korean artifacts or particularities, and this absence suggests

that the family inhabits a cultural vacuum. The lack is particularly obvi-

ous if the book is compared to the rich evocation of traditional Korean

culture at the mid-twentieth century to be found in Soentpiet’s Peacebound

Trains.30 The representation of space and of the figures and objects within

it thus implies that Yoon inhabits a state of acute deracination, and hence

there is a compelling need for her to embrace the new, surrounding cul-

ture. With the last vista, in the penultimate opening, Yoon stands outside,

at last faces the landscape, and declares, holding the sheet of paper on

which she has now written her name, “Yes, I am YOON”31—that is, she is

Yoon as mediated through English language and graphic symbols. The

concept underpinning this climactic moment is apparently hybridity, func-

tioning here as both a mental process which resignifies the everyday and

the target state of being. Yoon’s feeling of deracination expressed through


her anxiety about her name and her concomitant sense of loss is thus

formally resolved, but the outcome, we suggest, reflects incorporation into

the dominant rather than hybridity.

The book fails to resolve the kind of pastiche which constitutes open-

ing three. This illustration consists of three planes. The foreground plane

depicts a floor on which stand three eclectically assembled figurines—a

bird, a (Chinese) horse, and what seems to be something like a hedgehog.

The shadows cast by these figures underline that the direction of gaze is a

diagonal running away from the right lower foreground—that is, it fol-

lows the normal flow in a traditional East Asian painting. The wide

doorframe that opens onto the second plane is occluded halfway by what

we take to be a reference to a “Korean” rice-paper sliding door, although

it is palpably not such a door in that it lacks the necessary inner support-

ing framework.32 It is, however, the closest these illustrations come to in-

corporating a distinctive Korean reference point. Yoon and her parents

are situated in the second plane (just within the doorframe), where Yoon

practices writing the English alphabet. The diagonal flow is crossed, how-

ever, by the checkered floor tiles which lead the gaze back rightwards past

the family group to the third plane. Here, a shape isomorphic with the

“sliding door” (but half its size) embeds a planar representation of a wheat

field that apparently alludes to Van Gogh’s appropriation of Japanese per-

spective in rendering such scenes. The object looks like a painting, but in

a surreal touch it is in the process of becoming a doorway. Yoon sits fac-

ing away from this space, although the back of her chair borders it visu-

ally, and it is the light source for the shadow cast by her chair. Once the

viewer’s gaze has followed the picture’s sightlines in a right angle from

lower-front, to center-left, and thence to upper-center, Western single-

point perspective has begun to blend with and assert itself over Eastern

planar perspective. This is a fascinating maneuver, because the wheatfield

takes on the functions of a mise en abyme, in the sense that the allusion to

Van Gogh invokes the possibilities of hybridity between Eastern and West-

ern representational codes and hence conveys visually the purport of the

book’s theme.

In her awareness of such representational codes and their place in art

history, and in her readiness to put these elements together in experi-

10 • JAAS • 9:1

mental ways, Swiatkowska has produced a set of illustrations that approach

the sophistication of those of Allan Say, doyen of Asian American picture

book artists.33 She does not have an insight into the fabric of the depicted

culture that is comparable to Say’s, however, so that the book has nothing

to gain from Yoon’s Korean origin: she equally could have come from any

East, South, or West Asian society which used graphic symbols other than

the Roman alphabet. More than any other books of its sub-genre (iden-

tity problems posed for the migrant child when starting at an English-

language school), My Name is Yoon thus raises issues of cultural represen-

tation in picture books in a particularly acute way and points to a

propensity in the discourses about children’s literature to read from a

dominant-culture perspective.

A more dialogical version of the “beginning school” motif, we sug-

gest, is Soyung Pak and Joung Un Kim’s Sumi’s First Day of School Ever,

also published in 2003.34 This book, which targets a pre-school audience,

also focuses initially on naming and identity: “On Sumi’s first day of school,

her mother taught her two things. Sumi’s mother taught her what people

said when they wanted to know her name, and she taught Sumi how to

say it.”35 The preference for maintaining cohesion by repeating proper

nouns (Sumi, her mother, Sumi’s mother, Sumi) rather than employing

pronominals, is typical of picture books for the very young but also fore-

grounds the notion of a core selfhood. The story then threatens that

selfhood by posing the possibility that school is “a lonely place . . . a scary

place . . . a mean place . . . ,” and then by allaying those apprehensions (in

reverse order) through unfolding intersubjective relationships prompted

by Sumi’s capacity for artistic expression.

A comparison of the artwork with that of My Name Is Yoon points to

an exciting strategy for resisting simple assimilation to the dominant in

favor of cultural hybridization. Instead of depicting the drawings made

by Sumi, Joung Un Kim evokes a seemingly childlike art in her own illus-

trations, which is quite different from Swiatkowska’s adult sophistication

(a house in the background on opening two of Sumi’s First Day obviously

quotes child art in its depiction of windows and chimney and simple two-

dimensionality).36 Kim’s equivalent for Swiatkowska’s counterpointed ar-

tistic traditions is to combine the spatial relationships of figures and ob-


jects characteristic of children’s art with pictorial codes and perspectival

conventions reminiscent of East Asian painting, as when a scene is laid

out as a receding series of flat planes viewed from a medium-high posi-

tion.

Children’s art tends to arrange objects relative to each other, rather

than depicting how they might appear within Western single-point per-

spective, and Kim has eloquently drawn upon this practice.37 For instance,

opening eight employs a three-plane structure to depict a moment when,

following gentle teacher intervention, a boy who had mimed a racist joke

in opening seven tenders a friendly apology to Sumi. Viewed from a me-

dium-high position, the two children are placed symmetrically in the fore-

ground, seen in three-quarter profile from the waist up. The teacher ap-

pears as a small backgrounded figure in the second plane of the painting,

positioned visually between the heads of the children. She clasps her hands

behind her back, in a gesture of latent authority, but the intersubjective

exchange is entirely a function of the children’s reciprocal gaze. The effect

of such paintings is that while Sumi is integrated into an already multi-

ethnic classroom, there is a way of constructing and looking at the scenes

which is not assimilated into a “universal” (dominant-culture) way of

looking. The role of the teacher in this book is also less manipulative than

the role assigned to the teacher in My Name Is Yoon, so that teaching doesn’t

appear here as inculcation into the dominant.

Sumi’s First Day of School Ever is set within an American school space

but enables another way of looking at that space. The space of Korean

culture, both literally and metaphorically, is a more general problematic

in the picture books. A function of diasporic literature is to mediate be-

tween cultural history and tradition and everyday life in the society of the

host culture. If Korean characters are to be represented as engaging with

cultural boundaries, some decision needs to be made as to the cultural

formations and practices which will form the touchstones. Are these ele-

ments to be drawn from the distinctive traditional (now archaic) or from

the contemporary, more globalized culture? A tendency in picture books

is to situate the story in the everyday contemporary world but to incor-

porate Korean features from some half-century back. We will argue be-

low that the book with the most effective strategy is Peacebound Trains,

12 • JAAS • 9:1

which locates its 1950s historical narrative of wartime disruption and

loss within a 1990s frame.

As a further frame for discussing space and culture, we turn at this

point to a picture book produced in Korea, Ho Baek Lee’s What On Earth

Happened During That Time? (2000),38 and its English-American para-

phrase as While We Were Out (2003).39 What On Earth Happened is a good

example both of how the bodies that inhabit culture enact cultural prac-

tices by incorporation, habituation, and expression, and of how a domi-

nant culture appropriates another culture, in that the transposition of

the book into English saps its analytical edge and, in reducing it to a cute,

thematically universal book about a pet, implicates a sense of cultural

superiority. In its presentation of an insider/outsider contrast, Ho Baek

Lee’s original version deals obliquely with culture contact: while a family

has gone away on a brief overnight trip, their pet rabbit slips into the

house and lives as a human, eating human food, watching a video, ex-

perimenting with make-up and dressing up, looking at books, playing

with toys, and sleeping in a human’s bed. The rabbit has observed human

society from the outsider perspective of its home on the verandah, and

now for a few hours enters that foreign culture. This light-hearted book

in a way functions as a celebration of modern Korean family life, as the

rabbit experiments with the half-familiar space of what is referred to con-

tinually as “this house.” Lee’s work is also a useful corrective to a tendency

in Korean American picture books to identify “authentic” Korean culture

with archaic costumes, artifacts, and social behaviors, thus placing it al-

ways in the past. The particular way in which the book depicts the cross-

ing of a threshold prompts the insight that the story is also about the

limits of a child’s agency within a social formation. These themes per-

vade the book, so we will limit our discussion to two incidents in which

the rabbit engages with artifacts found in the house, and to the closing

page.

There are three significant differences between the Korean text and

the English paraphrase: the English text presents the rabbit as female,

whereas the original is not gender-specific (The decision to make the rabbit

female is perhaps intended to avoid suggestions of gender-bending, as

the rabbit experiments with cosmetics in opening 5 and dresses in female


clothing in opening 6.); story details are less specific in the English than

in the original, so that readers are expected to deduce more from text/

picture interaction; and the original text cultivates a sustained, overt nar-

rator-narratee relationship which the paraphrase mostly elides—this dif-

ference stems in part, but only in part, from the lack in contemporary

English of the kind of specific female discourse employed in the Korean

text’s narrative voice. The changes in the English text to narrative voice

(that is, to narrator/audience relationship) and the widening of gaps be-

tween text and pictures transform the book into a picture book mode

familiar to American audiences, but at the cost of its particular Korean

voice. Further, a major effect of the changed discourse is its impact on the

ideology of text. Because children’s stories draw heavily on recognizable

cultural schemata to enable accessibility, they are heavily loaded with cul-

tural baggage.40 A simple example is the rabbit’s watching of a video: the

English text describes the video generically as “a movie” (thus limiting

attention to the act of watching), whereas in the original Korean the rab-

bit is said to watch the animated version of Raymond Briggs’s The

Snowman.41 This famous little film doubles the theme of Whatever Hap-

pened, in that much of it involves the magically brought-to-life Snowman

exploring the house of his human maker and its cultural artifacts and

hence, for readers who recognize the reference, emphasizing the theme of

culture contact and the dialogue between thematic universality and par-

ticularity.

Similarly, in the incident depicted in opening 6, in which the rabbit

dresses up in a child’s hanbok (traditional female dress), the Korean ver-

sion represents this act as a cultural encounter, whereas the English ver-

sion focuses reader attention on the game of “dressing up” and thereby

on the primary story about a pet having the run of the house while its

owners are away. The left-hand page (black-and-white illustration) de-

picts the rabbit in the wardrobe, pushing clothing out onto the floor of

the room. The right-hand page depicts the rabbit dressed in a traditional

hanbok:

Korean text (literal translation)42 English paraphrase

Rabbit found something She finds a colorful costume.

wonderful while looking in the The youngest in the family wore it

14 • JAAS • 9:1

wardrobe. It is the party clothes to her first birthday party.

the mother of the house made It fits perfectly.

for the youngest child’s first

birthday party. They fit Rabbit

perfectly. Rabbit really likes these

clothes.

The facing pages of this opening offer a strong visual contrast between

the rabbit-ness of the rabbit on the left-hand page and the anthropomor-

phic appearance on the right-hand page. The human relationships and

cultural practices detailed in the verbal text, “something wonderful . . .

the party clothes the mother of the house made for the youngest child’s

first birthday party,” qualify the rabbit’s excitement and foreground its

status as an intruder upon the spaces of the mother, father, and children

“of the house.” The perfect fit and Rabbit’s pleasure in the clothes plays

against its representation in the two illustrations as incontrovertibly

lagomorphic to establish that, at this point, a boundary has been both

crossed and shown to be impermeable: the rabbit’s experience of the cul-

ture of the other is limited to sampling, as the next incident also illus-

trates.

The second incident (openings 9 to 11) involves an encounter with a

modern artifact, a pair of roller blades. Too small to wear them, the rabbit

perches on one and propels it across the room with a pair of chopsticks.

By combining such disparate artifacts in a surprising way, the rabbit shows

an inventive capacity for negotiating another culture. But, the combina-

tion is finally comic disparity, not culturally coherent, and the dispropor-

tion between the rabbit and these artifacts again locates the rabbit firmly

on the border between cultures.

The rabbit’s experience in exploring the house is emotionally satisfy-

ing, even though it is clearly just time out from its life as a rabbit, and it

has not been transformed in any way. That it always had remained a rab-

bit is asserted by the closing pages. Returning to the verandah, “Rabbit

sits as if nothing had happened.” The closing page, however, in a light-

hearted game between narrator and reader, affirms the impossibility of

complete cultural transfer:


Korean text English paraphrase

When the family return home, She’s had a wonderful adventure

they will say this:“By the way, and the family will never know.

why are there Rabbit droppings Or will they?

in every corner of the house?” All

of you know what happened

during that time, don’t you? . . .

Where the original Korean version draws explicit attention to the rabbit

droppings, which on a re-viewing of the pictures will now be discovered

on most pages, its English counterpart substitutes the oblique or under-

stated kind of utterance to be expected in English-language picture books.

That is, by asking the audience to engage in a gap-filling exercise, the

English text attributes primary significance to the droppings. This is a

different way of reading the story, with a different kind of validity, but is

achieved at the expense of shifting the significance (and genre) of the

book to an animal story, rather than a narrative about, and a celebration

of, culture. The complicity between narrator and narratee in the original

Korean underscores the three concepts on which the close hinges: the

family’s reoccupation of the space; the rabbit’s inability to occupy the

space fully in a human way; and the narratee’s awareness that “what hap-

pened during that time” encompasses both a story and a thematic signifi-

cance.

The rabbit experiences Korean culture as a visitor. By contrast, sev-

eral of the Korean American picture books represent experiences of

deracination. Peacebound Trains, Halmoni’s Day, and (by implication) A

Place to Grow invoke the Korean War and its aftermath as a cause of dis-

placement and alienation, separating people from home, family, and cul-

ture. Goodbye, 382 Shin Dang Dong depicts the experience of deracination

of a child taken to another country by emigrant parents. Finally, Cooper’s

Lesson depicts the sense of alienation and frustration stemming from the

dichotomies of both/and, either/or. Working within the broad picture book

conventions of positive representations of multiculturalism and euphoric

closure, all show characters who are reaching a deeper understanding of

cultural origins, displacement, and intersubjective communication.

Peacebound Trains achieves this outcome by embedding historical fic-

tion, presented as a memory told by a grandmother to her granddaugh-

16 • JAAS • 9:1

ter, within a story of the tribulations and aspirations of a diasporan fam-

ily. The book’s frame story tells of Sumi’s pain at her mother’s (Korean

Umma) extended absence: a widow, she has joined the army to gain the

education she needs to rise above factory work and long hours of travel

to places offering work, so Sumi is living with her grandmother. Sumi’s

anticipation of the train which will bring her Umma home elicits from

the old woman the story of her experience of dispossession and displace-

ment during the Korean War, culminating in the loss of her husband,

who had joined the Southern army and was never heard from again. The

two stories are structured contrapuntally: the grandmother’s loss is per-

manent and irreversible, both an intensely personal loss and a metonym

of all the separations and losses that occurred during the half-century of

occupation and civil war which has been a major factor in the production

of diasporan Korean communities since 1950. Sumi’s loss is temporary,

however, now metonymic of successful immigration, as Umma draws on

the resources of American society to overcome loss and deprivation. The

story’s final page, by counterpointing Sumi’s euphoric imagining of the

day of her umma’s return with a portrait of her grandfather, lost decades

before she was born, encapsulates the boundary between past and present,

loss and recuperation. Drawn into a reciprocal gaze with this handsome

man, determined and compelling, readers are drawn into the unfinished

business of divided Korea and the hopes of its diasporan communities.

The linking of diaspora and dystopian elements in twentieth-cen-

tury Korea is expressed explicitly in the poetic, metaphoric text of A Place

to Grow and implicitly in Halmoni’s Day. A Place to Grow is particularly

interesting because the illustrator, Marcelino Truong, has not depicted

Korean and American settings, but Vietnamese and English (the latter a

small village of sandstone and slate reminiscent of somewhere in the uto-

pian Cotswalds). The book’s endpapers include photographs of the au-

thor and the illustrator as children, and maps of the world showing their

respective migration routes (Korea to USA: Vietnam to England). In con-

necting two major sources of dispersal, and the two major East Asian war

zones since the end of World War II, the book has a clear universalizing

purpose. The vehicle and ground of the extended metaphor of natural

growth are established in the first opening by the literal utterance, “This


is the seed time. This is the growing time. When seeds flying in the wind

find their gardens to grow in and finally land.”

Text and pictures then work in close conjunction to explore the meta-

phorical possibilities of growth, journeying, and land in which to grow as

a way of talking about the dystopian experiences of warfare, displace-

ment, economic depression, political oppression, and official corruption

which prompt people to uproot themselves and seek a better environ-

ment. It is a considerable achievement, since the target audience is too

young to grasp the principles of metaphor or the abstract ideas being

suggested. Like all good children’s books, however, it conveys concepts

through narration and illustration of action and incident, as when open-

ings eight and nine connect drought, the despair produced by unemploy-

ment, and the need for a humble street hawker to bribe those in power. It

does this through pictorial depiction of incident, body language, and fa-

cial expression, and through the dialogue between father and daughter

which makes explicit the ground of the metaphor:

“A place like that is no place to grow a flower.”

“So the seed flew with the wind?” I ask.

“Yes, we flew with the wind,” he says.43

Transplantation is not an act of forgetting, however, and these books

affirm sustained affiliation with the place of dispersal as something posi-

tive. The grandmother theme thus has a key metonymic function, as the

grandmother (halmoni) who visits from Korea confronts the cultural as-

sumptions of a Korean American child by embodying alien customs, but

also represents the pressure of tradition. Hence in Halmoni’s Day Jennifer’s

grandmother only appears in a silk hanbok, and when brought to school

for Grandparents’ Day contrasts with the other grandparents, “dressed in

their running shoes and casual clothes.”44 A difference between America

and Korea is thus invoked as a difference in degrees of formality in social

register (implicitly understood as a contrast of the traditional and the

contemporary). Like the other grandparents, Halmoni is invited to tell

her favorite story, and responds with a very elliptical story about her child-

hood during the Korean War, focusing on the five-year absence of her

father and his return as a gaunt, chronically ill person still characterized

by “courage and kindness.”45 Her story is about love which transcends

18 • JAAS • 9:1

separation and difference, and hence parallels her relationship with Jen-

nifer.

The contrast between place of dispersal and diasporic space is evoked

in Goodbye, 382 Shin Dang Dong through carefully constructed parallels

in text and pictures between the narrator’s originary home and her new

home. Jangmi’s sense of displacement is readily visible in an example of

paired openings—first, the moment of separation, and then the first

moments inside the new home in Massachusetts. In the first example, the

text invokes sadness, induced by loss of home, past, and friends:

“The taxi slowly pulled away. I looked at our beautiful home one last

time. Like rain on the window, tears streaked down my face.”46

As we have observed in some of the other picture books, the illustration

uses conventional Eastern planar perspective for specific emphasis, con-

structing the scene as three planes, with a directional flow from lower

right to top left (so determined by the gaze of the three human partici-

pants in the scene). Jangmi occupies the central plane between the house

(farthest plane) and her parents (front plane), establishing a sociocentric,

centred orientation, but her body is positioned 180˚ to her mother’s, both

forming and disrupting a vector which flows from the bottom right-hand

corner to the dark, open doorway of the house. This layout emphasizes

the moment of displacement and the further contrasts of inside and out-

side (the house, in general, is a deeply emotional space that implies and

emblematizes inner and outer), and between corporeal and domestic ori-

entation.

The scene represented well illustrates the principle that the physical

and the mental are fused as space and emotion, and are experienced from

the body outward. The delimitation of Jangmi’s space is emphasized by

the depiction of her turning around, surveying what is being lost. What

lies before her is the pathway delineated by her parents—migration from

Korea to the United States. The scene thus encapsulates the view that the

body is the center from which space is apprehended, and that apprehen-

sion of space is commonly transposed from the individual to the whole

culture, which is perceived in turn as the natural spatial center of the

world.


Throughout this book, sense of space pivots on the placement of the

body. Jangmi is inescapably in the middle of the world of her own space,

and this space is shattered at the core by her relocation. For much of the

book, her world is evoked as one of imminent and actual loss (and the

book’s opening invocation of memory maintains that sense of loss as an

emotion that can’t be relinquished—“My heart beats in two places: Here,

where I live, and also in a place where I once lived”47). The story also

offers substitution: one tree for another tree; one type of food for an-

other; neighbors for friends and relatives. Crucially, however, the offer of

a renaming, to abandon the name Jangmi and adopt its English transla-

tion, Rose, is refused. This is a commonly rehearsed trope in Korean Ameri-

can picture books, as in migration picture books more generally, and de-

rives its prominence, we suggest, from its taking account of individual

cultural distinctiveness while situating the subject within majority-cul-

ture practices. A subjectivity from which to negotiate relationships be-

tween past, present, and future is asserted as essential.

For the self to be reconstituted, the information that makes up the

conceptual space into which the character has moved must be combined

or organized so as to have value and produce a positive emotion. The

representation of a chronotope infused with the possibilities of newness

and growth, pivoting on relations of confinement or opening, is particu-

larly important in picture books, which invariably include the principal

character as part of the scene. The companion illustration in 382 Shin

Dang Dong depicts Jangmi’s body in a different relation to her parents

and an opening (this time a window) at which she now avoids looking:

emotions pivoting on loss, confinement, and possibility are central to her

transition from culture to culture. In this second scene, Choi has selected

a much higher angle of view, and combines this perspective with her naïve

painting style to delineate Jangmi’s sense of her lack of agency. Stranded

between the illumination from the open window and the patch of light it

throws on the floor in the picture’s foreground, her body is shown as

distorted, with excessively long arms which hang helplessly as an emblem

of her estrangement, in contrast to her father’s purposeful gesturing (re-

flecting the overt anchoring of the text in proximal space—“Look,” Dad

pointed out the window, “there’s a tree just like the one at home”48). The

20 • JAAS • 9:1

picture repeats the sociocentric, centered orientation, with Jangmi again

positioned at 180˚ to her parents, to depict her at a point of tension, or

emotional discomfort, within the scene.

From here, the book has three openings in which to reconcile that

tension and move the character to a more emotionally agreeable subjec-

tive state. It accomplishes this task by offering three key developments: a

reconciliation of old and new, as her familiar possessions are unpacked

and put in place; the welcome of new neighbors, including a girl her own

age, to become new friends; and the affirmation of memory as something

which is emotionally sustaining rather than a source of pain. The pivotal

factor in Jangmi’s reconstruction of subjectivity is emotion: she has not

reached a more complex mental apprehension of her situation, but a stron-

ger emotional grasp beyond the limitations of sense. In other words, she

has exemplified a growth in emotional intelligence which has enabled her

to reconfigure the components of the conceptual space into which she

has entered.

We conclude with a brief discussion of a newly emerging theme in

Korean American picture books which strive to mediate gaps between a

child’s experience of difference and historical Korean culture. Cooper’s

Lesson can be classified as a variant of the major story group in which a

child (usually a second-generation Korean American child) encounters

cultural difference through exposure to the experience or behavior of a

grandparent.49 In this book, however, Cooper, an Anglophone child of

mixed Korean and American parentage, is involved in conflict and then

dialogue about the nature of difference and belonging with an older Ko-

rean migrant, the shopkeeper Mr. Lee. The lesson he has to learn is that

within the signification “Korean American” is embedded (in Kandice

Chuh’s phrase) “an irresolvable vacillation.”50 For Cooper, his friends’ sure-

ness that he is not American, but originates from somewhere else, and his

own sense that he is not Korean, because “I can’t speak the language,”51

combine to produce a deep anxiety about identity. Cogan’s accompany-

ing oil paintings accentuate a profound sense of alienation by placing

Cooper on the edge of scenes; by depicting him from a high viewing angle,

so that his head becomes disproportionately large for his body; and by

exploiting contrasting color fields and impressionistic, “uncompleted”

backgrounds to suggest Cooper’s discomfort in the spaces he enters.


As noted in some of the other books, subjectivity pivots on ways of

engaging—or failing to engage—with specific concrete spaces, and

Cooper’s story here works a variation on the boundary between cultures

and the legibility of sign systems. Unable to read the sign that is his own

body, and lacking fluency in the language and culture with which his ap-

pearance aligns him, he appears miserable and abject. The analogy he

finds with Mr. Lee’s vacillating status as both Korean and American, and

Mr. Lee’s familiar story of the highly qualified migrant hampered from

employing his skills by his lack of proficiency in spoken English, sets Coo-

per on the path to embracing difference and hybridity. The book’s closing

sentences first offer the hope that Cooper’s problem can be “figured out”

by communal discussion, and then embody a symbolic solution—“The

sun dipped behind them [Cooper, his mother, and Mr. Lee] as they walked

along, the soft sound of their languages mingling in the gentle evening

air.”52 As space itself becomes benign (“gentle”), linguistic multiplicity

becomes one with that space (“soft”), so that space and the figures within

it move toward the condition of hybridity. In offering a thematic closure

in this way, while leaving the story outcome still to be resolved, Cooper’s

Lesson evades an entirely euphoric close, although its frame is still a move-

ment from lack to optimism.

Because multicultural metanarratives propose as outcome a reclaim-

ing of subjectivity within a resignified space, they tend to elide endemic

social divisions and on-going grief and loss. Such elision is particularly

evident in picture books dealing with the theme of adoption, which we

have not included in this present study.53 Goodbye, 382 Shin Dang Dong

and Cooper’s Lesson are a little more cautious, but still enter into the dis-

course which presupposes an enlightened perspective, and therefore re-

quires immigrant people to reclaim subjectivity by adjusting their desires

to the dominant social formation. None of these books seems skeptical

about multicultural metanarratives, but all generally assume that the

signifiers of identity can be resignified, so that the diasporan child may

undergo a transition of subjectivity from specific (Korean) cultural

grounding to an identity articulated as multicultural.

The strongly positive emphasis we have observed here is more likely

to be found in picture books than in books for older readers. As Mendoza

and Reese argue, it seems desirable to ground young children in “accu-

22 • JAAS • 9:1

rate, culturally sensitive images” before offering them more problematic

representations.54 While their specific concern is with equipping young

readers to deal with books that misrepresent minority cultures, the pro-

cess also enables more sophisticated reading (and writing). For example,

Haemi Balgassi, author of Peacebound Trains, has also published a young

adult novel, Tae’s Sonata.55 While not aspiring to be more than a slight

and predictable account of a Korean girl’s middle school experiences, the

novel unfolds identity through a web of power relations within and across

ethnic groups, and embeds subjective agency within the context of social

empowerment. Like most young adult fiction, Tae’s Sonata is grounded

in a narrative of personal development, and uses this device to convey the

familiar themes of developing understanding and affirming diversity. The

novel form, of course, also endows its principal character with much more

of an interior life and thence a more complex and conflicted sense of

cultural positioning that incorporates more negative representations of

experience. Picture books may lay the ground for more complex repre-

sentations of this kind, but their scope and audience preclude them from

full engagement.

Notes

1. Marcus Noland, “The Impact of Korean Immigration on the U.S. Economy,”Institute for Corean-American Studies, Inc., ICAS Special Contribution, No.2002-1010MxN, http://www.iie.com/publications /chapters preview/365/4iie3586.pdf (accessed 16 December 2004).

2. Dalia Kandiyoti, “Comparative Diasporas: The Local and the Mobile inAbraham Cahan and Alberto Gerchunoff,” Modern Fiction Studies 44:1(1998): 77.

3. Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretchof Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Senses of Place, eds. StevenFeld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996),33.

4. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place,” 34.5. This precise formulation of the topos is from Kandice Chuh, Imagine

Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham and London: DukeUniversity Press, 2003), 110.

6. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic sum up the tenets of Critical Race Theoryin the following three propositions. First, racism is the common, everydayexperience of most people of color in the United States. Second (the theoryof “interest convergence” or material determinism), because racism advances


the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people(psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it.Third (the “social construction” thesis), race and races are products of socialthought and relations, categories that society invents and manipulates; seeCritical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press,2001), 6.

7. Jean Mendoza & Debbie Reese, “Examining Multicultural Picture Books forthe Early Childhood Classroom: Possibilities and Pitfalls,” Early ChildhoodResearch & Practice 3: 2 (2001); electronic journal: http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/v3n2/mendoza.html (accessed 7 Sept 2005).

8. Allan Say, Home of the Brave (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Walter LorraineBooks, 2002).

9. Critical Race Theory, 6.10. Examples include the following: Min Paek, Aekyung’s Dream, rev. ed. (San

Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 1988); Yangsook Choi, The Name Jar (NewYork: Knopf Books, 2001), which also includes a culturally influentialgrandmother; Soyung Pak and Joung Un Kim, Sumi’s First Day of SchoolEver (New York: Viking Books, 2003); Helen Recorvits and Gabi Swiatkowska,My Name Is Yoon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

11. Examples include the following: Sook Nyul Choi and Karen M. Dugan,Halmoni and the Picnic (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Sook Nyul Choiand Karen M. Dugan, Yunmi and Halmoni’s Trip (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1997); Edna Coe Bercaw and Robert Hunt, Halmoni’s Day (New York: DialBooks, 2000); Soyung Pak and Susan Kathleen Hartung, Dear Juno (NewYork: Viking, 1999); and, here as a framing device, Haemi Balgassi and ChrisK. Soentpiet, Peacebound Trains (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

12. Haemi Balgassi and Chris K. Soentpiet, Peacebound Trains (New York:Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Frances Park/Ginger Park and Yangsook Choi,Goodbye, 382 Shin Dang Dong (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic,2002); Soyung Pak and Marcelino Truong, A Place to Grow (New York:Scholastic, 2002).

13. Sun Yung Shin and Kim Cogan, Cooper’s Lesson (San Francisco: Children’sBook Press, 2004).

14. Soyung Pak and Susan Kathleen Hartung, Dear Juno (New York: Viking,1999); Soyung Pak and Marcelino Truong, A Place to Grow (New York:Scholastic, 2002); Soyung Pak and Joung Un Kim, Sumi’s First Day of SchoolEver (New York: Viking, 2003).

15. Bercaw and Hunt, Halmoni’s Day.16. See the discussion in Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place.”17. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973),

89.18. Haemi Balgassi and Chris K. Soentpiet, Peacebound Trains (New York:

Houghton Mifflin, 1996).19. Bercaw and Hunt, Halmoni’s Day.

24 • JAAS • 9:1

20. See Soentpiet’s comments in http://www.soentpiet.com/index22.htm, andHunt’s in http://www.roberthuntstudio.com/illustration.html (both accessed4 January 2005).

21. Cynthia K. Richey and Trevelyn E. Jones, “Preschool-grade 4: Fiction,” SchoolLibrary Journal, 43:1(1997): 75.

22. Helen Recorvits and Gabi Swiatkowska, My Name Is Yoon (New York: Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2003).

23. The criteria are long-standing, but are cited here from the announcement ofthe award to Swiatkowska. See http://www.nypl.org/press/keatsaward2004.cfm(accessed 4 January 2005)

24. My Name Is Yoon, opening 12 (picture books, which normally consist of 32pages, are rarely paginated, so reference is conventionally made to double-page “openings,” counting from the first opening on which story materialappears. Of the books to which we refer, only Cooper’s Lesson and PeaceboundTrains are paginated).

25. Ibid., opening 2.26. Melissa Lee Wright, 2003, in http://www.papertigers.org/book reviews/ USA/

riverbank/Yoon.html (accessed 4 January 2005)27. “Universalisms and Minority Cultures,” differences: a journal of feminist

cultural studies 7:1(1995): 188.28. See John Stephens, “Modality and Space in Picture Book Art: Allen Say’s

Emma’s Rug,” CREArTA 1(2000): 46–47.29. For example, compare the painting depicted in opening six with Lorrain’s

Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Silvia (1682; AshmoleanMuseum, Oxford). Framed, symbolic landscapes were employed extensivelyin Western Medieval and Renascence art, especially in representations ofThe Annunciation (for example, Fra Filippo Lippi, c. 1440; Leonardo da Vinci,1470s; Sandro Botticelli, 1489–90).

30. Soentpiet’s double-page illustration (pp. 16–17) depicting traditional life in1950 thus includes, among other things, traditional dress; painted screens; alow dining table, at which the family kneel or sit on pillows; lacqueredfurniture with mother-of-pearl inlay; a bowl of persimmons; a jade-greenceladon vase; a shinsulo (a brass chafing dish of a form peculiar to Korea).

31. My Name Is Yoon, opening 14.32. A depiction of this kind of door within a traditional Korean house can be

seen in opening three of Park and Choi’s Goodbye, 382 Shin Dang Dong,although even here it is hung inside-out and is adjacent to a window whichis traditionally Chinese, not Korean.

33. See, for example, Say’s picture books grounded in the history of his own andhis family’s migrations back and forth between Japan and the United States– epitomized in his Caldecott Medal winner, Grandfather’s Journey (Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

34. Soyung Pak and Joung Un Kim, Sumi’s First Day of School Ever (New York:Viking Books, 2003).


35. Ibid., opening 1.36. Ibid. openings 4, 5 and 7.37. The child who draws or paints is a recurrent motif in beginning school books.

Hartung’s production of “child paintings” in Dear Juno, for example,demonstrates an acute sense of a child’s privileging of relation overperspective.

38. Whatever Happened During That Time? (Seoul: Jaemi Maju, 2000) [ourtranslation of title and publishing details].

39. While We Were Out (La Jolla, CA: Kane/Miller Book Publishers, 2003).40. See John Stephens, “Writing By Children, Writing For Children: Schema

Theory, Narrative Discourse and Ideology,” in Michèle Anstey and GeoffBull, eds., Crossing the Boundaries (Pearson Education, 2002): 237–248.

41. The Snowman, based on the picture book, The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs;directed by Dianne Jackson (A TVC London Production, 1982).

42. All translations from Korean are by Sung-Ae Lee.43. A Place to Grow, opening 4.44. Halmoni’s Day, opening 8.45. Ibid., opening 10.46. Goodbye, 382 Shin Dang Dong, opening 7.47. Ibid., opening 1.48. Ibid., opening 11.49. Sun Yung Shin (text) and Kim Cogan (illustrator), Cooper’s Lesson (San

Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 2004). As adoptees themselves, both authorand illustrator have a particular interest in the insider-outsider paradoxexplored in their book.

50. Chuh, Imagine Otherwise, 91.51. Cooper’s Lesson, 26.52. Ibid., 30.53. See Joanna Halpert Kraus (text) and Karen Ritz (illustrator), Tallboy’s Journey

(Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books, Inc., 1992); Jan M. Czech (text) and FrancesClancy (illustrator), An American Face (Washington, DC: Child and FamilyPress, 2000); and Eve Bunting (text) and Chris Soentpiet (illustrator), JinWoo (New York: Clarion Books, 2001).

54. “Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom:Possibilities and Pitfalls” (see note 7).

55. Haemi Balgassi, Tae’s Sonata (New York: Clarion Books, 1997).

Diasporan Subjectivity and Cultural Space in Korean American Picture Books

Documents

Transcript of Diasporan Subjectivity and Cultural Space in Korean American Picture Books