Abstract
This review situates how culture, difference, and identity are discursively constructed in Millicent Min, Girl Genius and Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time, two award-winning books written by critically acclaimed Asian American author Lisa Yee. Using contextual literacy approaches, the characters, cultural motifs, and physical settings in these texts are deconstructed to explore the nuances of Asian American youth identities that intersect along the lines of class, gender, and race. This review ends by offering teaching strategies for explicating Asian American young adult literature to critically investigate the representations of Asian American counter-narratives, experiences, and youth cultures.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to acknowledge and thank Dr. Violet J. Harris from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the CLE reviewers for providing such helpful feedback on this manuscript.
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Rachel Endo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her current research interests are comparative multicultural education, immigrant/refugee experiences in post-1965 contexts, teacher education, and transnational studies of Asian America.
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Endo, R. Complicating Culture and Difference: Situating Asian American Youth Identities in Lisa Yee’s Millicent Min, Girl Genius and Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time . Child Lit Educ 40, 235–249 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-009-9085-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-009-9085-0