by Michael Cart
It was in the mid-seventies that Chinese Americans also found an early literary representative of their own in Laurence Yep, who began writing about their cultural experience in his second book, Dragonwings (Harper, 1975). Yep’s own experience of growing up as an outsider between cultures had actually found expression—though metaphorically—in his first book, a fantasy titled Sweetwater (Harper, 1973). Yep continued to write powerfully about his experience throughout the seventies and eighties in such other novels as Child of the Owl (1977), Sea Glass (1979), The Serpent’s Children (1984), and Mountain Light (1985).
Although Japanese Americans also found their faces and stories represented in the early work of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Lensey Namioka, and Yoshiko Uchida, it would not be until the nineties that the true diversity of other Asian peoples found expression in young adult literature. In the preface to his important anthology American Dragons (Harper, 1993), a collection of creative short work by twenty-five contemporary Asian American writers, Yep stressed the diversity of Asian cultures in America. “Asian Americans,” he noted, “come not only from China and Japan but from the many countries around the Pacific rim, including the Philippines, Korea, India, and even Tibet. Recently there have been new waves of immigrants, especially from Southeast Asia, countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos” (Yep 1993, xi–xii).
This is an important point, because the umbrella term Asian American tends to treat individuals from dramatically different countries and cultures as a single, homogeneous whole, and, obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. The same problem has plagued literature about Native Americans and, especially, about Latinos and Latinas, who come from a world so diverse (twenty-one different nations comprise Latin America alone) that no one can even agree on a uniform term to embrace it. Although I will typically use Latino or Latina, others prefer Hispanic as a broader term that emphasizes the common denominator of the Spanish language, even though there is no one universal form of the language in this hemisphere, and the more politically conscious regard Hispanic as too Eurocentric (and too often a language of oppression, to boot).
These disagreements aside, there is universal agreement that no viable body of literature for and about Latinos existed until the 1970s and 1980s, and even then, the growing size of the populations that remained, in large part, invisible far outpaced the amount of work available. There were a number of interrelated reasons for this, beginning with the very language of Latino literature. “Most of what we write,” Roberto Rodriguez and Patrisia Gonzales (1994, B7) declared, “is considered noise, foreign chatter at best. We are often unable to find a medium for our rich and textured prose—the amalgam of Spanish, English, Indian and calo (street talk). Many publishers not only find our writing unacceptable; they can’t read it.”
Why they can’t read it brings us to a second reason: there were—and, perhaps, still are—too few Latinos working in children’s book publishing, which has resulted in a lack of knowledge of how to acquire, evaluate, and publish for this market. And a reason for that is there was no significant tradition of creating an indigenous literature for young readers in most Latin American countries, as the few available books there were imported from Spain. And much of that was drearily didactic and moralistic. As a result, most of the Latino and Latina writers for young people who began appearing in the seventies and eighties were already established authors for adults; writers like Rudolfo Anaya, Gary Soto, Nicholasa Mohr, Sandra Cisneros, and others. It was not until the nineties and the creation of literary prizes like the Pura Belpré and Americas awards for excellence in Latino literature that a new generation of writers began focusing exclusively on writing for young readers. Further encouragement came from mainstream publishers’ creation of Spanish-language imprints (e.g., Rayo from HarperCollins, Mirasol from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Libros Viajeros from Harcourt) and from the emergence of small independent publishers like Arte Público, Lee and Low, and Children’s Book Press.
Even then, books for and about young people from other cultures remained a hard sell. Donald Barr (1986, 50), writing in the New York Times Book Review, noted, “American adolescents, for the most part, have little interest in their own traditions and almost none in anyone else’s.” Six years later, Margaret McElderry (1994, 379) agreed, noting in her 1994 May Hill Arbuthnot lecture, “The number of such books has drastically diminished in the last fifteen or twenty years. In part this has happened,” she continued, “because our young readers some while ago seemed to lose interest in other countries, other peoples, other ways, tending instead to concentrate on themselves and their peers and their life-styles.”
Political Correctness
Nevertheless, this began gradually to change in the later eighties as the sheer numbers of foreign born demanded that attention be paid. But that raised the vexing question “By whom?” If the question were applied to the creators of multicultural literature, an increasing number of critics were questioning the authenticity of literature being created by those writing from outside a cultural experience. Writing in Library Trends, Karen Patricia Smith (1993, 345) noted, “For years, minority populaces have been written about and ‘described’ by essentially white authors who are outside the cultures about whom they are writing or illustrating … the question posed and often debated is whether or not material written by so-called ‘outsiders’ is actually valid material.”
As I pointed out in chapter 1, this issue was being debated as early as the 1950s and may be one that can never be satisfactorily resolved, for at its core, it asks an unanswerable question: can a writer’s imagination be powerful enough to create a viable work of fiction about a culture he or she has observed only from the outside?
Richard Peck (1993, 21–22), for one, believes it can: “Now in the nineties,” he asserted, “we’re being told to march to the beat of multiculturalism. This baffles novelists who thought we’d been celebrating the cultural mix of this country well before the textbooks touched on it… . Unless a book is to be judged by the race or ethnicity of its author. In which case we are standing at the edge of an abyss. Fortunately a novel need not brand the race of its characters as a film must. A novel can begin at the next epidermal level down, to explore what we all have in common.”
Jane Yolen (1994, 705) added a similarly cautionary thought: “What we are seeing now in children’s books is an increasing push toward what I can only call the ‘Balkanization’ of literature. We are drawing rigid borders across the world of story, demanding that people tell only their own stories. Not only does this deny the ability of gifted storytellers to re-invigorate the literature with cross-cultural fertilization, but it would mean that no stories at all could be told about some peoples or cultures until such time as a powerful voice from within that culture emerges.”
Both Peck’s and Yolen’s observations bring us to the brink of another abyss: that aspect of multiculturalism that, in the later 1980s, came to be called political correctness, or what I have dubbed “multiculturalism without a sense of humor.” It is related to a certain stridency that accompanied efforts to maintain the cultural identity and separate integrity of the newly immigrant populations. The traditional image of America as a melting pot seemed to be in the process of being replaced by a new metaphor, America as stir-fry, the ingredients of which, of course, remain distinct.
Hazel Rochman (1993, 17), who came to the United States from South Africa, was fearless in her indictment of this movement: “Multiculturalism is a trendy word, trumpeted by the politically correct with a stridency that has provoked a sneering backlash. There are P.C. watchdogs eager to strip from the library shelves anything that presents a group as less than perfect. The ethnic ‘character’ must always be strong, dignified, courageous, loving, sensitive, wise. Then there are those who watch for authenticity: how dare a white write about blacks? What’s a gentile doing writing about a Jewish old lady and her African-American neighbors? The chilling effect of this is a kind of censorship and a r
einforcement of apartheid.”
Of course, this works both ways. One of the Latino books that Anglo censors most often challenge is Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, which— according to the watchdogs—celebrates witchcraft in its story of a New Mexican boy’s magical encounter with a curandera, a healer, and her owl spirit. Rodriguez and Gonzales (1994, B7) explain: “The objections to Anaya’s book indicate that those who would ban it do not understand Latino culture or its indigenous roots: the practice of healing is part of our indigenous memory.”
Native American culture has been particularly subject to misrepresentation and, accordingly, has engendered some of the hottest debates, including challenges to the authenticity of the treatment of Native Americans in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, in the work of Jamake Highwater (three of whose novels were selected as ALA Best Books for Young Adults), and in individual titles by Lynn Reid Banks, Ann Rinaldi, Gerald McDermott, and others.
In 1970 the futurist Alvin Toffler (1970, 4) coined the now-familiar phrase “future shock,” which he defined as “the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.” Future shock had certainly played a part in the first great wave of immigration that occurred in the late nineteenth century but to a lesser degree, certainly, than in the one that followed in the 1980s, principally because the former was more gradual, spread out over some four decades (roughly from 1880 to 1920). The second great wave about which I’ve been writing in this chapter came crashing on our shores in the space of only a single decade, however, bringing with it future shock in spades! Too few people deal well with such rapid change; it induces in them not only disorientation but also fear—principally fear of the unknown, which is why good, information-providing books about the culture and the individual human conditions of new immigrant lives are so important.
Even by the dawn of the new decade of the nineties, the issues continued to be so complex and so various as to baffle minds and perplex hearts. But I believe, as I wrote in the first edition of this book, that it remains literature, whether imported from other lands in other languages, imported in translation, written in English in this country by immigrants who describe the invention of new selves here or recall the realities of former lives in the lands of their national origins—it is literature that will prove the place of illumination, the neutral center where all of us can go to find out about one another and, come to think of it, ourselves. “We” need to read books about “them,” and “they” need to read about “us,” and in the process, perhaps we will find that we are all simply “we.”
the early nineties
A Near-Death Experience
As the new decade of the nineties dawned, Connie C. Epstein, former editor in chief of Morrow Junior Books, reflected on the condition of young adult publishing. Noting “weakening sales for what had come to be called ‘problem stories,’” she reported that “some editors, marketing directors, and subsidiary rights directors, discouraged by this downturn, have been wondering whether the young adult novel was ready for burial, and certainly most would agree that the genre is in turmoil” (Epstein 1990, 237).
Four years later, in 1994, the critic Alleen Pace Nilsen (1994, 30) agreed that assessing “the health of the genre” had become tantamount to “gathering at the bedside of an ailing loved one,” though she qualified her diagnosis by explaining she was referring specifically to “the realistic problem novel” rather than “the entire body of modern young adult literature.”
But what else, one is tempted to ask, was there? Well, there was horror, of course, the market for which continued to thrive in the early nineties. “Adolescents now constitute a booming niche market for the peddling of published gore and violence,” Paul Gray (1993, 54) explained in Time magazine, noting that Christopher Pike had 8 million copies of his books in print in 1993 and that R. L. Stine boasted 7.6 million copies of his books. Shortly thereafter, the entertainment journalist Ken Tucker, in a reference too good not to mention, dubbed Pike and Stine the “Beavis and Butthead of horror.” “It’s easy to understand why young adult horror is so popular,” he continued. “It’s a combination of youth’s eternal desire to shock its elders and a budding interest in all things odd and uncomfortable” (Tucker 1993, 27).
That interest was reflected not only in books but also in the spate of increasingly violent slasher movies that had been dominating the box office since the eighties, starting with Sean Cunningham’s Friday the Thirteenth and Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street. The interest in the “odd and uncomfortable” was also finding expression in the popularity of the daytime confessional reality shows that had started with Phil Donahue in 1972; had come of age with Oprah Winfrey, whose show debuted in 1986; and had then taken a swan dive into the sensational in the early nineties, with increasingly over-the-top programs hosted by the likes of Jerry Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Ricki Lake, Maury Povich, and others. As a result, the Penn State sociologist Vicki Apt said, “Television emphasizes the deviant; if you really are normal, no one cares” (Roan 1994, E1).
Nilsen felt that this was another reason for the decline in realistic YA fiction. “The daily media glut of stories about the personal foibles and tragedies in which young people get involved … leaves little unexplored territory for authors to mine,” she said (Nilsen 1994, 32).
Although it was small comfort, this decline was not confined to literature for young adults. Adam Hochschild (1994, 11), founder of Mother Jones magazine, offered a similar observation about adult fiction in the 1990s: “One reason people write fewer traditional realist novels these days is that modern readers are jaded. Film, radio, first-person journalism, prying biographers and, above all, TV have saturated us with reality.”
Small wonder, then, that readers continued to search for escape in the borderline fantasy pages of series romance, which, accordingly, continued to sell every bit as briskly as horror, with Sweet Valley setting a particularly blistering pace. According to the series’ publisher, Bantam Doubleday Dell, there were more than 81 million copies of Sweet Valley titles in print in 1994, with more to come, for, as the publisher trumpeted, “Sweet Valley continues to offer teens all the racy romance, drama, and adventures they’re looking for in a series” (Bantam Doubleday Dell 1994, 90).
In the meantime, African American teens were being represented in a romance series of their own. According to Bantam Doubleday Dell, Walter Dean Myers had “created” the series 18 Pine Street.
Historical romances were flourishing, too. Titles in the Pleasant Company’s American Girl series for preteens routinely enjoyed six-figure sales. For older teens, Jennifer Armstrong’s Wild Rose Inn books had been added to Bantam’s long-standing Starfire imprint.
The popularity of such genre series is perhaps the most durable phenomenon in the ongoing history of publishing for young readers. Such series were, as we have seen, staples of the twenties and thirties, thanks in large part to the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Today’s writing factories, which are still turning out similar titles on the creative assembly line as fast as kids can read them, are no longer called syndicates, however, but packagers. Their typical function is to develop an idea for a series, sell it to a mainstream publisher, and then assemble the talent—including author, editor, and illustrator—necessary to produce a finished product for delivery to (and manufacture and distribution by) the publisher. One of the leading packagers of the eighties was Daniel Weiss Associates, which produced ten series a month in “a market-driven style and standard,” according to Elise Howard, who was then the company’s vice president (Cart 1996, 148). Packagers would become even more important and influential, as we will see, in the late nineties and early aughts with the explosion of what came to be called chick lit.
For the moment, it bears repeating here that teens themselves were purchasing these original paperback genre series—unlike hardcover novels of realism, which adult librarians and teachers usually bo
ught—and usually at a mall-based chain bookstore. And fewer and fewer hardcovers were being published and purchased. Thanks to a combination of taxpayer revolts (spearheaded by California’s notorious Proposition 13), diminishing federal funding, and the American economy’s recessionary malaise, the institutional market continued its precipitous decline throughout the eighties and into the early nineties. If anything, the school library market was even punier than that of the public library, as educators were increasingly spending their dwindling resources on new technology instead of books. By 1993 the industry magazine Publishers Weekly noted that the market had dropped from 80–90 percent institutional to only 50–60 percent (Dunleavy 1993). As a result, Nilsen observed, major publishing houses “moved from the past practice of bringing out about 80% fiction and 20% nonfiction to doing 80% nonfiction and 20% fiction”—the point being that, while cash-strapped institutions were avoiding “nonessential” fiction, they continued to buy nonfiction to support curricular needs. The publisher Beverly Horowitz confirmed this, citing growing pressure to increase profit margins by eliminating whatever books or kinds of books that didn’t turn a profit, “both quick and high” (Eaglen 1990, 54).