[This weekend
I’ll be at a
book signing for an excellent new young adult historical novel, Dori Jones Yang’s The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball. So
this week I’ve AmericanStudied the histories within and behind a handful of
children’s books and authors, leading up to this special post on Yang’s book.]
On what a young
adult novel can add to our collective memories.
As someone who
believes that the story
of the Chinese Educational Mission is one of the American histories most in
need of adding to our collective memories—for its own complex and inspiring
sake, and for the many histories to
which it connects—I’ve thought a great deal about where and how we might
turn to help create such an addition. There are historical texts we could all
peruse, such as Yung Wing’s autobiography My Life in China and America (1909).
There are websites we could all visit, such as CEM Connections, an evolving compilation (by
their descendents) of biographies of the 120 Educational Mission students.
There’s the idea of constructing
a historic site for the Chinese Educational Mission in Hartford (where its
headquarters were located), a project that is purely hypothetical at the moment
but to which I remain broadly committed nonetheless and which could become a
space for visitors to learn more about the CEM. And of course there are various
works of scholarly
and narrative
history on or related to the CEM, each of which has something to add to how
we remember and understand this community, moment, and set of American
histories and stories.
Until I learned
of Dori Jones Yang’s The Forbidden
Temptation of Baseball (2017), however, I’ll confess that I had not thought
nearly enough about what children’s or young adult literature have to offer
(this despite all the good reminders that this week’s blog subjects, among many
others, have provided me over the years). Yang’s young adult novel focuses on a
fictional protagonist, Woo Ka-Leong (also known as Leon), who, along with his
older brother, becomes one of the 120 young men who travel from China to the
United States to take part in the Chinese Educational Mission. Just as I have
done in my
own writing about the CEM students, Yang uses their connection to baseball
as a lens through which to write about a number of aspects of this community:
of course their complex and evolving relationship to and combination of aspects
of both American and Chinese culture, but also their relationship to each other
(Leon and his brother diverge on the idea of the sport in particular), to
European American peers and adversaries, and to a number of other historical
and symbolic issues that I won’t spoil here. Just as my teacher
and mentor Proal Heartwell does in his book A
Game of Catch (2014), Yang makes baseball a perfect lens through which
to frame her ethnic historical young adult novel.
That’s one
lesson of Yang’s book, I’d say—the reminder (one critics
of Colin Kaepernick and his peers would do well to remember) that sports,
far from being separate from our social and political issues, always echo and
extend those other cultural and historical elements. Helping young adults think
about that side to sports is a great goal for any YA novel, I’d say. Another
vital goal is to highlight the similarities and differences that audience
members might find with historical and cultural figures and communities. Of
course a Chinese American reader might find very different such comparisons to
Leon than a European American one, and my mixed-race sons might find there own
ways in—but in each and every case, there would be shared aspects and divergent
ones, echoes of our own lives and identities and moments that feel quite
distinct or unfamiliar. The more all readers—and perhaps especially young adult
readers—can find both those familiar and those unfamiliar sides to characters
and stories, the more they can both recognize our shared humanity and empathize
with the very different ways folks have experienced human history. Yang’s book,
like the other great texts I’ve highlighted this week, help YA readers and all
of us do both of those important things.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other children’s histories or stories you’d highlight?
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