by Yoo Kyung Sung, University of New Mexico

Last week I attended the Literacy Research Association conference. I came home empowered and inspired to reflect on, “what now?” Conference presentations titles that I perused and thought about attending all focused in some way on “voice.” For example, providing conceptual tools for educators to sensitively engage with transnational parents in the United States, well meaning “global” teachers’ describing their classroom’s journey in global literature, a biography writer describing the vulnerability experienced while writing about a historically great man in Taiwan (Chiang Kai-Shek), exploring teacher candidates’ resistance to understanding textual code-switching in books dealing with immigration issues, etc. As a result, my own, new personal goal can best be described as “reading to listen.” Continue reading →

by  Yoo Kyung Sung, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Often I think my English accent is like a cultural microchip that contains my cultural and linguistic DNA. That microchip reflects the local and global contexts from several different U. S. and international environments in which I have lived. My personal aesthetic responses in my literature reviews reflect the salient insights of both my views of diversity and of contemporary global connections as they relate to multiculturalism in the U. S. Continue reading →

by Yoo Kyung Sung, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Korea’s traditional beauty is mirrored in its architectures, symbols, pottery, and ancient palaces and make up most of the common “Korean” postcard faces I encountered when I visited one of the most popular and largest bookstores in Seoul, Kyobo books. I mumbled, “interesting,” and felt and tasted a kind of betrayal. I felt I have fought consistently for a postcolonial non-Eurocentric portrayal of Asian and Korean cultures in my children’s literature studies, yet such traditional subjectivity is produced and consumed internally in Korea as a mark of Koreanness. Tradition is like a double edged sword providing rich cultural facets and, concurrently, glaringly flawed over-representations of a culture, producing a “tunnel vision” (Scott,1998, p.47) of narrow understanding of that culture.
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by Yoo Kyung Sung, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Following last week’s blog, I reread my WOW Book Reviews, all of which illustrated conflicts with young protagonists and their cultural affiliations. Each protagonist struggled with their cultural identity, though in different ways. Eleven year-old Lucy, a Chinese-American in The Great Wall of Lucy Wu (Shang, 2011), is a proactive basketball player who tends to downplay her Chinese side. Her parents are Chinese-Americans and when a new family member from China upsets the cultural dynamics at home, it challenges Lucy’s perception of herself. Maomao, in A Near Year’s Reunion (Cheng-Liang, 2011), is a Chinese girl that lives with her mom most of the time because her father’s job requires a lot of travel. The Indian-American girl, Dini, in The Grand Plan to Fix Everything (2011), is also eleven. She revels in Bollywood movies, Bollywood celebrities, and dreams of being a movie scriptwriter. Her journey from the small rural community of Swapnagiri, in Southern India, to Maryland is filled with discoveries for her. Continue reading →

By Yoo Kyung Sung, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

December is not only the last month of the calendar year, but it also holds a special significance for academia as it marks the end of yet another semester. Most importantly, though, December is a time for reflecting upon the past year’s events and for valuing family, friends, and other acquaintances in our lives. I thought, then, I would ask myself what I recall that was most interesting, delightful, and even troublesome in terms of children’s literature around the world. What stands out for me is cultural authenticity — the trendy hot key phrase of the 90’s that, while seeming to have become a semi-retired hot issue, still remains an unresolved tension in children’s literature today.
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