My eyes are not almonds
and other brief observations on the politics of representation in children's books
Drawing people is hard, because it is political.
I spent these last couple of weeks procrastinating on the task of drawing a character who I imagine to be a nine-year old boy of Chinese descent. My pencil stopped each time I thought about drawing him, because I was trying to figure out how to draw a person of East Asian descent without resorting to the racist but familiar stereotypes that indicate a character is Asian.
How do I let my audience know the race of this character? Is it the eyes? Not necessarily. “Almond-shaped” eyes are not exclusive to people of Asian descent; it’s just an eye shape, one of many. I found this great analysis by Kat Chow for NPR’s CodeSwitch on the history of using almonds to describe Asian eyes. Looking at contemporary children’s books featuring people of Asian descent drawn by people of Asian American descent, I notice a wide variety of eye shapes and styles. Yet I know these characters are Asian. How?
Sometimes, it’s because the book itself is about being Asian or a member of the Asian diaspora. It’s about a holiday (Goldie Luck and the Three Pandas) or a cuisine (Dim Sum for Everyone). Other times, it’s about overcoming a racist experience (The Name Jar is a picture book example of overcoming internalized racism, and From a Whisper to A Rallying Cry is a young adult book about the murder of Vincent Chin and the Asian American civil rights movement it spurred).
I’m grateful that these books exist, and at the same time I want to see more books with diverse characters that don’t reduce them to stories about their diverse traits. We have more stories to tell than that, and we need them all. Towards that end, I found this illuminating YouTube video about the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association’s comprehensive rubric for evaluating AAPI representations in youth literature. Another term I learned pursuing this rabbit chase was “Incidental Diversity” where books contain diverse characters, but their diverse traits are not the focus of the story. And here’s an op-ed arguing that the growing popularity of incidental diversity is might also be a push to be “not too diverse.”
Just to be clear, the underrepresentation of diverse characters is still a major problem in children’s publishing. Looking at the research by Sarah Park Dahlen (and illustrated by David Huyck), I notice that anthropomorphized animals are better represented in children’s books than than the combined representation of characters of any diverse background.
The representation of diverse characters in children’s books is so low that it forces those of us who illustrate diverse characters into the politics of representation whether we want to or not. The choice to draw against the grain of a racist stereotype needs to be a conscious one, especially when we still are being asked to represent huge swaths of people with our one tiny character. It is a heavy burden for a fictional character to bear, much less the illustrator.
Fortunately, the reality is that characters who are general stand-ins for nine-year old Asian American boys don’t make for good books. If I do my job as a writer, I will write into being a *specific* boy with a name, personality, likes/dislikes, and experiences. In these early stages, I have to draw my way to him, because I don’t yet know him or what he looks like. But as I do, he will transform from a series of political choices about general representation to someone personal and specific. He’s still emerging, and I look forward to meeting him.
Thoughtful... I look forward to meeting him too!