At the beginning of Robin McKinley’s 1982 young adult fantasy novel The Blue Sword, Harry Crewes has been living in a colonial desert outpost after the death of her parents. The Homeland, where Harry is from, is a thinly disguised Victorian England. The lone Homeland city of Istan shares uneasily a border with Damar, a mysterious, magical Afghanistan concealed in the mountains.
War is brewing between Damar and the North, and when King Corlath of Damar comes to negotiate with the Homelanders, his magic—the kelar—demands that he kidnap the young woman to aid his people.
Harry, it turns out, has plenty of kelar in her blood, too. As a result, she has visions of legendary Damarian queen Aerin, she learns the language at a prodigious rate, and she adapts quickly to bridleless horsemanship and battle training. After a brutal six weeks of swashbuckler boot camp, she wins the laprun trials (the Damarian cavalry Olympics), becomes one of the king’s elite Riders, and rides out to war against the demonic Northern army.
While I was re-reading the novel, I told my husband rather helplessly, “I love this book. I loved it when I was a teenager. I love it now.”
But Harry clashes with Corlath on a major point: she wants to warn the Homelanders—or as the Damarians call them, the Outlanders—about the Northern army and to ask them to defend a narrow gap in the mountains through which the Northerners could overrun Harry’s old home and ambush Corlath’s army. Corlath has exhausted his diplomacy with the pseudo-Victorians. “Let them take the Outlander city,” he says of the Northerners. “[I]t will keep them amused.”
Despite the fact that Harry loves Damar—and is falling for Corlath—she cares about the Outlander station: her brother still lives there, she has friends there. It was her world not long ago. She defies the king and risks betraying Damar—and Corlath—in order to go and warn her old countrymen and to guard the pass herself.
The Blue Sword won a Newbery Honor and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. It was followed by The Hero and the Crown—a prequel, which tells the story of Lady Aerin. While I was re-reading the novel, I told my husband rather helplessly, “I love this book. I loved it when I was a teenager. I love it now.”
That does not mean it’s without problems:
Harry is a white savior. The Damarians are dark haired and dark skinned, and Harry is a towering blonde. Yes, it’s revealed eventually that she has a quarter Damarian blood, so maybe Emma Stone can play her in the movie.
It can be seen as colonial apologia. The authorities and military stationed at Istan seem to love the desert and respect the people. The colonizers are excised of brutality; they are bumbling and well-intentioned.
Then, there is also the fact that Corlath kidnaps Harry—or rather, his kelar forces him to do it. The abduction of women is a charged act—sexually and politically—and the characters know it. But the way McKinley rewrites kidnapping is interesting. First of all, Corlath feels pretty terrible about it:
She was smiling a little in her sleep, but it was a sad smile, and it made him unhappy… He knew only too well that by stealing her from her people he had done a thing to be ashamed of, even if he had no alternative.
McKinley takes pains to make sure that Corlath’s intention isn’t rape. Indeed, out of Corlath’s sympathy for her grows respect, and love.
On Harry’s end, instead of the abduction being an instrument of a sexual awakening that leaves her in thrall to love, she is bestowed with power. Corlath gives her swords, a horse—a means to leave. Her magic asserts itself. She has the kind of freedom she didn’t enjoy while trying to be a lady at the colonial outpost—and more. An early signal of her autonomy is her clarity and humor about the situation:
Corlath didn’t look at her the way a man looks at a woman he plans to share his bed… He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.
Throughout the episode, Harry retains her ability to think. The book is full of these dry asides—the characters are aware that the situation is epic, but their reactions are not grandiose. They’re very funny and human, and I found that—still find it—appealing.
The Blue Sword combines feminist power and magic—and that is and was seductive. But the book’s flipping of one script does not make it perfect on all other issues—although the seductiveness remains in place.
Another thing I loved about the book when I was younger was the idea of a foreigner coming into another culture and, despite many struggles, thriving in it.
She was a figure in some story other than her own—an embroidered shape in a Hill tapestry, a representation of something that did not exist in her Homeland.
Harry feels that she has no history in the place she is living—but it is making history out of her. At another point, Harry tells the Oracle, Luthe:
Oh, I know—one never sees ahead of behind. But I see even less. It is like being blindfolded when everyone else in the room is not. No one can see outside the room—but everyone else can see the room. I would like to take my blindfold off.
It explicitly talks about being caught between two cultures. And it interweaves this all with mystical powers and Fate, leading young me to wonder if maybe there was a point to all of this terrible uncertainty. Maybe this alienation, this uncertainty, was exactly what would make me powerful.
In a way, the book captures the helplessness and the vitality of adolescence—the feeling of being perched on the cusp of something huge, but of not knowing what that will be. But more important to me when I first read it, it explicitly talks about being caught between two cultures. And it interweaves this all with mystical powers and Fate, leading young me to wonder if maybe there was a point to all of this terrible uncertainty. Maybe this alienation, this uncertainty, was exactly what would make me powerful.
As I said, it’s very seductive.
The Blue Sword informs who I am. I can see its fingerprints all over me. Here is where I learned what “bohemian” meant and that swords and sorcery could be interspersed with wit. Here is where I learned to mine a book for offpage sex. Here is where I learned about bridges.
Luthe, the mage whom Corlath consults before battle, tells Harry:
Friends you will have need of, for in you two worlds meet. There is no one on both sides with you, so you must learn to take your own counsel…It is not an enviable position, being a bridge, especially a bridge with visions.
I bought in wholeheartedly to the idea of being the bridge—even though it meant I bought into the idea that I would always be struggling.
I bought in wholeheartedly to the idea of being the bridge—even though it meant I bought into the idea that I would always be struggling. No—it meant I would always see myself as struggling and that that struggle was for a noble and perhaps magical cause.
But the truth is that I was never in a foreign land. I have always lived here in North America. And it isn’t always struggle. The idea of being this bridge has lost its luster. I think of my daughter who is biracial—a classic born of two worlds child—and I think that she should not have to follow that template unless she wants it. She was born here, too, and the dominant narrative of her life doesn’t have to be one of never feeling quite at home.
It is okay to feel out of place or foreign. But it doesn’t have to be the only way she can see herself in books.
I can also give my daughter other books and dreams and characters to follow and identify with—characters who are not necessarily white, people who inhabit their worlds fully.
I love The Blue Sword. It is a part of who I am. But I can also give my daughter other books and dreams and characters to follow and identify with—characters who are not necessarily white, people who inhabit their worlds fully. When she’s older, I can give her Zen Cho’s Sorceror to the Crown, or Saladin Ahmed’s stories. If she likes The Blue Sword, great—we’ll have plenty to talk about.
But my daughter doesn’t have to see herself as a bridge in order to reconcile her place. Because the thing about bridges is that people walk all over them to get to other, more fantastical lands.
In Ellen Conford’s 1976 young adult novel, Dear Lovey Hart, I Am Desperate, freshman Carrie Wasserman finds herself writing an anonymous advice column for her high school newspaper.
The column becomes wildly popular to the dismay of Carrie’s father, the school’s head guidance counselor. But Carrie finds her position difficult: she is falling for her intense and driven co-conspirator, the paper’s editor, Chip. Her advice to her friends ends up going against her alter-ego’s words. She’s trying to juggle homework and writing. Most of all, she is out of her depth fielding all-too-serious questions that come up. Her answers become more flippant—sometimes a little mean—and the tide of opinion turns against Lovey Hart.
And, oh, how worn out I was from trying to find new gimmicks for the Eternal Number One question: “How do I get him to notice me?” I began turning from sensible, cute suggestions, to downright sarcastic answers. “Drop an anvil on his foot.” “Put Jell-O down his shirt.” “Fall off his roof.”
Lovey Hart was probably one of my favorite books from junior high and high school. The book was made into an Afterschool Special and spawned a sequel, We Interrupt This Semester for An Important Bulletin, in which Carrie contends with a Southern belle and imagines herself in scenes from a romance novel in which her sleeves keep getting ripped off, leaving her creamy shoulders exposed.
Conford, who died a year ago, was one of those authors whose books were always on the paperback carousel at both the school library and the city branch library. A few of her novels were recently reissued with Lizzie Skurnick’s imprint at Ig Publishing.
Re-reading, I realized that Conford’s wisecracking but empathetic voice was one I tried—and keep trying—to channel with varying degrees of success.
Lovey Hart was funny—Carrie was funny. That was important to me as a young woman, and it is maybe why I read the book over and over.
I needed to hear the wry voice of a girl who herself is allowed and encouraged to be funny, who explores how wit can sometimes be mean, or wise, or kind. For example, here are Carrie’s thoughts as she contemplates her crush, Chip:
But while a brooding, intense boy makes the heart beat faster, he also puts a simultaneous strain on the brain, because you are frantically trying to think of something to say to make him stop brooding, which is an outright contradiction, but true, nevertheless.
Carrie is self-aware enough to know she’s falling for Chip’s act, but she can see her own absurdity in trying to console him. There is a buoyancy to Carrie’s voice—to this book’s realism. It was such a relief to encounter it at an age when life often felt confusing and intense and hard to bear.
I suspect that my teachers mistrusted humor. Trying to corral a roomful of teens making boner jokes can maybe do that to a person.
There was a preponderance of Earnest Literature About Issues in our curriculum. Moreover, among the “realistic” contemporary young adult selections pushed by my teachers and librarians were cautionary tales about young women who got pregnant, who got lost in drugs, who fought the system and lost. The Chocolate War. The Language of the Goldfish. The Pigman. Go Ask Alice.
I am oversimplifying the novels I was recommended. But in my memory, so many of the characters in those books seemed so tragic and so—well—white. And if they were non-white, well, that alone was often written as a calamity. In the world of true-life, contemporary young adult books of the 80s and 90s, my mere non-white existence was an Issue.
My reality is not grim. I don’t think others should get to frame it that way either.
Don’t get me wrong, I gladly read—and still read—Issues books: I spend many an evening sitting in the dark, sobbing into my duvet, my tearstained face illuminated by the impassive light of my Kindle. It is one of the most luxurious things one can do.
But often so much of the narrative of these books is about giving an audience—giving other people, the culture—the opportunity for catharsis and absolution.
How nice for other people.
As an aside, maybe that’s why I consumed teen series featuring non-white protagonists who, you know, lived their lives.
Teen series were not considered good reading by my teachers. But, as I noted in a previous column, the novels sometimes featured characters who led rich and varied existences—characters such as Faith from The Girls of Canby Hall, or Claudia Kishi from The Babysitter’s Club. And avoiding that narrative of a life crystallized by tragedy is why I’ve given my young child funny middle-grade series like Lenore Look’s Alvin Ho books, or Andrea Cheng’s Anna Wang books.
“Sometimes—no, most of the time—popular and worthwhile are not synonymous at all,” Carrie’s guidance counselor father—an educator—tells her in a rant against Lovey Hart’s column.
Carrie answers, “But everything doesn’t have to be worthwhile . . . Some things can be just for fun.”
In a way, Lovey Hart is in conversation with those Issues books. Lovey Hart may be “for fun,” but it is also worthwhile.
Conford depicts people with problems—girls with problems—who are not tragic even though their lives could easily turn that way. Maybe that’s why I identified with Carrie, although her universe seemed pretty white. It’s maybe why I wanted, however imperfectly, to identify with her.
There are seeds of tragedy in Lovey Hart. Carrie receives letters from girls wanting the attention of boys, sure, but she also gets them from students who’ve lost all their friends after quitting drugs, kids whose parents are getting divorced—many of the scenarios of the Issues books are alluded to in Dear Lovey Hart, I Am Desperate. And then there is also Carrie’s buddy, Terry, who is in love with her French teacher:
“Lovey Hart says,” Terry began abruptly, her voice distant and dreamy, “that you should let someone know if you like them, because they might be liking you all the time, and if you’re too shy to ever tell each other, you’ll never know what Might Have Been.”
“Terry,” I said nervously, “I think she was talking about a sophomore and a junior, not a student and a teacher.”
Terry believes herself emotionally ripe enough to handle a love affair. One night, Terry impulsively shows up at Mr. Stokes’s apartment to declare her feelings.
This is an Issue.
In a different book, it could have easily taken a terrible turn. Even as I write this, I am reading a discussion which shows how very easily student-teacher relations take terrible turns.
Conford goes with what I think is the best-case scenario, which is also somehow a reasonable ending to Terry’s drama. Terry ends up spurned and alive—unharmed despite sustaining some embarrassment. And . . . well, that is probably the most optimistic-while-plausible scenario in life, isn’t it? Being alive and unharmed except for minor embarrassment is the best for which we can realistically hope.
Beverly Cleary, author of many funny, wise classics of children’s literature, turned one hundred years old on April 12. She is known for having created such characters as Ralph, the motorcycle mouse, Henry Huggins, and Ramona and Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby.
I went through piles of Cleary’s books as a kid, but Ramona and Her Mother, I only needed to read once.
Ramona and Her Mother opens with the Quimbys celebrating Mr. Quimby’s new job at the checkout counter of the Shop Rite. Mr. Quimby’s bout with unemployment has left the family with bills, though, and Mrs. Quimby stays at her job as a medical receptionist. The family has a disastrous brunch. Ramona dyes her legs with bluing when she and her friend Howie try to make an ocean. After a long, difficult day, Ramona’s parents fight and then make up. Beezus gets a terrible haircut. Ramona wears her comfortable new pajamas to school underneath her clothes and accidentally leaves them there and tries to hide it.
Throughout, we find Ramona trying to be good and dependable—although this also often means suppressing her curiosity and imagination. She wants to be seen as responsible, like Beezus. She overhears people saying that Beezus is her mother’s girl, and she wishes she could be the same.
One episode, in particular, I have always remembered.
The Quimbys have had a terrible day. When they come home, they discover that no one has plugged in the Crock Pot, and there is no dinner waiting. Mr. Quimby and Mrs. Quimby argue about who was responsible.
“I suppose you think turning on a Crock-Pot is woman’s work.”
The edge in her voice matched the edge in his.
“Not exactly,” said Mr. Quimby, “but now that you mention it—”
Even in just that short exchange, the book manages to touch on women’s changing roles in the household in that era and the tensions they sometimes brought. Cleary has been lauded for the groundbreaking realism of her work, and this sequence shows how beautifully and skillfully she does it. Ramona and Her Mother was published in 1979, and this entire episode—with the hungry kids, tired parents, the simmering tension over Mrs. Quimby going to work and the worries about money—it’s remarkable.
Ramona frets about Beezus, who is grating carrots—she’s worried that Beezus will scrape her fingers and bleed into the salad.But the blood is in the growing argument between the parents.
The parents continue to quietly pick at each other while putting together a dinner of pancakes from of the meager contents of their pantry. Meanwhile, Ramona frets about Beezus, who is grating carrots—she’s worried that Beezus will scrape her fingers and bleed into the salad.
But the blood is in the growing argument between the parents—and all the tensions about who was supposed to provide, who was supposed to work—not just in this moment but in life—slowly come to the surface until finally Mr. Quimby tells Mrs. Quimby the pancakes aren’t cooked through. When she disagrees, he reaches over and slashes them.
They ooze.
I never read Ramona and Her Mother after the first time—not until I was an adult. Not until I became a parent.
Mrs. Quimby swats Mr. Quimby with a spatula and stalks out of the room. The summaries I glanced at all seem to go with some variation of Mrs. Quimby hitting Ramona’s dad with a spatula, with no mention of the pancakes. But for me, the scene turns on Mr. Quimby’s almost comic aggression toward dinner—comic, but also somehow not funny.
Mr. Quimby finishes making the meal. Later, Ramona sneaks into Beezus’s room, and the two comfort each other.
I talk a lot in this column about how I read and re-read books.
I never read Ramona and Her Mother after the first time—not until I was an adult. Not until I became a parent.
Like Mr. Quimby, my dad was unemployed on and off. He had been a psychiatric social worker. He later worked as a freelance translator. We operated a diner for a while, and then he started selling and putting together computers.
After my father’s first bout with unemployment, my mother, who had been a nurse-midwife in Taiwan, went to work as a seamstress in a factory. She worked steadily from the time I was four or five. She didn’t try to certify for nursing in Canada because she never felt her English was good enough. She resented my father greatly for what she perceived as his failure to support the family. And, of course, they fought.
At some point, my mom started telling me things. She’d stop by my room before bedtime and launch into long monologues about how hard she had to work and how much she hated her life.
At some point, my mom started telling me things. She’d stop by my room before bedtime and launch into long monologues about how hard she had to work and how much she hated her life. She blamed my dad. She said he was irresponsible and that I had to help support the family by being good and quiet and never wanting things.
She also made me feel like there was no one else she could talk to—and maybe that was true. Her parents, who had come to live with us, didn’t like my dad and would blame her for marrying him. My mom’s limited English meant she didn’t feel comfortable with our Anglophone neighbors, and the friends who did speak her language were terrible gossips.
So she talked to me.
I defended my dad to her—he and I had always been close—but I also felt grown up to be trusted with family burdens. In a lot of ways, I wanted, as Ramona did, to be seen as a good helper to my mother. But sometimes that wish isn’t healthy, and now I see it cost me too much. I was ten or eleven, maybe. And I ended up worrying not about the welfare of our family—I ended up feeling responsible for my mother’s happiness and, worse, her deep, deep unhappiness.
When I told my dad that my mom sometimes unburdened herself to me—and that I defended him valiantly—he looked sad and angry. He told me I was a kid and that he was sorry that I had to deal with it. I was outraged at the time. I was mature. I was sure I could be helpful.
Near the end of the episode in Ramona and Her Mother, when Ramona sneaks into Beezus’s room and the two snuggle under the covers, Beezus says she’ll be there for Ramona if their parents divorce. She adds:
I read a book about girl who took care of her brothers and sisters when their father died, but that was off in the mountains someplace where they all picked herbs and things. It wouldn’t work in the city.
Beezus mulling over “herbs and things” is funny. But it occurs to me that that’s what I did with many of the books I read—then and now. I, like Beezus, was sifting through what I knew and what I’d learned from stories to come up with a way to solve my problems.
By day, I’m sure I was a plucky and cheerful kid. But through the long, anxious night of my childhood, Beezus and Ramona’s attempt to find answers about what to do and how to be mirrored mine in all its imperfections. Beezus didn’t find a perfect solution from reading a book. Neither did I. But I guess maybe I didn’t—couldn’t—recognize the issues I had.
I, like Beezus, was sifting through what I knew and what I’d learned from stories to come up with a way to solve my problems.
We read for different reasons. We read to educate ourselves, to explore. We read for comfort and escape and connection. Stories that do all of those things and more are the ones that I end up loving and remembering.
The pancake slashing and its aftermath have always stayed with me. I don’t know if I can say that I loved Ramona and Her Mother when I was a child. It may have overwhelmed me. At the time, I lacked the emotional maturity to dissect why I remembered Cleary’s words so perfectly while my feelings around the book stayed numb.
I do remember dwelling on the differences between us: Ramona and Beezus had each other. And overnight, their parents overcame their resentments, where mine couldn’t seem to. My parents weren’t white. English wasn’t their first language. My feelings and my world were different.
I do remember dwelling on the differences between us: Ramona and Beezus had each other. And overnight, their parents overcame their resentments, where mine couldn’t seem to.
There are people who expect perfect analogs to their lives in the books they read; they dismiss work with which they can’t identify. I couldn’t really afford to do that—and to a great extent, still can’t. A lot of this column has been about finding myself in books. But I know that I can still love a book if I don’t see me—and that sometimes, I can find something good where I think I won’t.
Yes, sometimes we will not recognize ourselves in what we read. But what we can gain is the breadth of experience and feeling and wisdom and, yes, diversity of viewpoints that books offer—the knowledge outside one’s experience. Those “herbs and things” that may have seemed irrelevant or extraneous at the time—the things that kept books from being a perfect fit—can sometimes fit in the future. And even if they don’t—well, that’s okay, too.
I see now that Ramona and Her Mother did connect to me and that, in a way, it waited for me while I grew.
I see now that Ramona and Her Mother did connect to me and that, in a way, it waited for me while I grew.
We read for different reasons, and maybe at that point in my life, I was reading to escape. Maybe I didn’t want to feel too much for what was happening on the page. I can embrace the feeling now. The book stayed with me all of these years. It stayed until I learned some sympathy for the child I was.
Sweet Valley High and The Girls of Canby Hall were the two teen novel series I read and re-read from grimly and determinedly in my 80s and early 90s adolescence.
Sweet Valley High, the storied Random House series, featured blonde twins, Elizabeth (the “good” one) and Jessica (the “not-so-good” one) Wakefield, living in the small Southern California town of Sweet Valley. The concept was created by the mysterious Francine Pascal, whose name graced the covers. Beginning in 1983, Pascal oversaw a team of ghostwriters through over 152 books, through prequel and sequel series, and even a television sitcom. But although the franchise has gone through revivals and updates, the original stays in the popular memory. The great Roxane Gay has written about her love for the series, and Pascal herself has occasionally emerged from the south of France LIKE THE GLAMORPUSS WE ALL SUSPECTED SHE WAS to offer new books, such as Sweet Valley Confidential, which chronicles the adult lives of Elizabeth, Jessica, and the Sweet Valley gang.
The Girls of Canby Hall series, published by Scholastic, was less popular and less ubiquitous. (I could find and could read an entire Sweet Valley High while standing in the supermarket while my parents shopped.) Nevertheless, Canby Hall had a healthy run of 35 books starting in 1984, all bearing the author name of the fictional Emily Chase.
Canby Hall followed the lives of three girls attending an exclusive New England boarding school. Roommates (#1) opens with Dana, the big-city girl, enjoying a last run through the through the streets of New York. She zooms past Goldman’s Dry Cleaners, “which was really owned by a Pakistani family,” and asks herself how she’ll survive without the “Mandarin Chinese take-out place.” (I’ve . . . never actually heard the term “Mandarin Chinese” applied to food, but I guess it’s the cuisine of Beijing?) We then meet Faith, who is from a black neighborhood in DC and worries that she’ll be among only white peers. And we finally encounter farm girl Shelley, who has been sent to Canby Hall to expand her horizons—ostensibly beyond her boyfriend Paul. On arrival, however, Shelley finds not just her horizon but her entire world rocked when she discovers she will be rooming with an African American student.
Faith picks up quickly on Shelley’s discomfort and asks what’s wrong, resulting in this:
“Oh no. I don’t know many black people, but” —Shelley thought for a second about how to finish the sentence— “but I’m sure they can be as nice as anyone else.”
She knew the words had come out all wrong as soon as she said them, but it was too late to take them back.
The moment is interesting and familiar, and moreover highlights the fact that race is an important issue in the series. After Shelley, Faith, and Dana graduate, they’re succeeded by Toby and Jane—two white characters—and Andy, an African American student—in Making Friends (#18).
In Sweet Valley, race is the major problem in the books that deal with characters of color. After it’s treated, it goes away. At Canby Hall, awareness of race is something the girls live with, but race is not the only event of their lives.
This insistence on centering race is the most significant difference between these two contemporaneous series. Canby Hall deliberately makes an African American girl one of the main characters in a setting—an upper-crust private girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts—that sounds pretty gosh-darn white. The original Sweet Valley High novels, on the other hand, center on white characters in a setting and at a time that could very easily and realistically include, say, characters of Latino or Asian descent—a Southern California public school.
And yes, Sweet Valley does have drop-in characters of color. In Rosa’s Lie (#81), Rose Jameson/Rosa Jimenez attempts to pass as white to pledge a sorority, while in Out of Reach (#50), Jade Wu just wants to dance! But her father is strict! Her father is a doctor and her grandparents run a laundry! Jade will bring dishonor! I’d call it Asian American character bingo, but is it really bingo when you cover all possible spaces? In Sweet Valley, race is the major problem in the books that deal with characters of color. After it’s treated, it goes away. At Canby Hall, awareness of race is something the girls live with, but race is not the only event of their lives.
Often these novels are written by ghostwriters. More precisely, it falls to teams of invisible—often young—women the task of series maintenance, because, I guess, anonymous maintenance is what women do.
Let’s take a moment to talk about novel series aimed at girls.
Francine Pascal is a person, but Carolyn Keene, the name on the Nancy Drew books, and Emily Chase are not. Still, whether or not the author credited on the cover is real, often these novels are written by ghostwriters. More precisely, it falls to teams of invisible—often young—women the task of series maintenance, because, I guess, anonymous maintenance is what women do. (One notable writer for Canby Hall was romance legend Julie Garwood, who penned What’s a Girl to Do? [#14].)
Books in these kinds of series can be uneven and sloppy, with terrible, implausible plots. Some are written with flair. Most of them can be very comforting in their familiarity. I can still recite the stock epithets applied to Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield through every book—their blue-green eyes the color of the Pacific, their matching lavalier necklaces, their perfect size-six figures. And because so many books keep coming out, they gave the illusion of letting the characters grow with readers over time. For readers of Canby Hall, that meant growing up with at least one African American character.
Of course, just because Canby Hall acknowledged race didn’t mean it was perfect—far from it.
Of course, just because Canby Hall acknowledged race didn’t mean it was perfect—far from it.
Tension over Shelley’s racist remark fuels the conflict for the first half of the first Canby Hall book. Dana ends up mad at both parties for making her feel so uncomfortable, to the point where the roommates make that classic move of dividing up their room with masking tape. But the fact that this is a three-way conflict is where Roommates really breaks down for me.
I remember as a kid wondering why Dana didn’t take Faith’s side. After all, big-city Dana has supposedly lived in harmony with all of her fellow creatures across the melanin spectrum. But although she’s annoyed with Shelley, she blames Faith for making things unpleasant—unpleasant for her.
In the book, Dana frames Shelley’s remark as a faux pas. Shelley’s shock, her discomfort, and her actual words really don’t come off that way to me. But let’s go with it as a social misstep: maybe it is a minor blunder—and if so, why doesn’t Shelley apologize? Why doesn’t Dana even attempt to step in with her? It’s pretty easily rectified. But it’s Faith who is taken aside by Dana. Faith is faulted for being Too Angry.
As a kid, I was irritated by Dana’s giving Faith the cold shoulder. But now I realize the doubleness of my reaction, because I’d never have done what Faith did to begin with—I would never have called Shelley out because I knew—I already knew at age twelve—that that would have social consequences. I would have never dared make Dana feel awkward.
The onus seems to be on the person of color—the person who’s just been insulted!—to smooth things over, to make it right.
Let me emphasize that African American experiences of racism are vastly different from my own experiences as a girl of Asian descent growing up in Canada, but this one moment in Roommates bore similarities to my experiences at that time, and later in life.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially because my re-reading of the first Canby Hall novel took place at about the same time that this excellent piece by my editor, Nicole Chung at The Toast, came out. In “What Goes Through Your Mind: On Nice Parties and Casual Racism,” Chung describes her reactions at a dinner she attended where a woman remarked that Chung, who is of Korean descent, looked like the entire cast—the entire Asian American, male and female, child and adult, cast—of the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat.
Chung describes her indecision—her desire to issue a crushing retort warring with her fear of making the rest of the people at the dinner uncomfortable, and her sadness that no one else says anything. In this, as in the fictional incident described in Roommates, the onus seems to be on the person of color—the person who’s just been insulted!—to smooth things over, to make it right. Faith doesn’t smooth things over—not at for a long time. In fact, in the first half of Roommates, she gets in some good zingers.
For instance, in a getting-to-know-you chat, the new roommates end up talking about Norman Rockwell. Shelley starts raving about his work, saying, “His paintings are so true.”
“Not my truth,” Faith retorts.
As a kid, I barely knew who this Rockwell guy was. (I’m Canadian, okay?) Reading this exchange as an adult, I am simultaneously delighted by Faith’s answer—It’s just like Twitter!—and dismayed by the fact that Shelley’s love of Norman Rockwell seems implausible for a fifteen-year-old girl.
Re-reading as an adult is a funny thing. Sweet Valley High #1, Double Love, really is terrible. Roommates has great lines.
I’m glad that young me got to grow up with Faith, but I wish she’d had a more sympathetic writer—nowadays, these books would not be enough.
As an adult, I also can finally figure out that writer Emily Chase of the Canby Hall series is not real. I know that the books were conceived in a New York publishing house and kept up by a troop of young New York women. That most likely, the character they had the most in common with—the character that comes off best in the series—is Dana, the white New Yorker running through the streets of Manhattan, past the Pakistani dry cleaners and a Chinese takeout place. That the writer was probably someone who told herself that because she shared a city with people who were not white, she was cool with the whole race thing.
Reading this with mature eyes, I enjoy having it confirmed that Shelley is indeed, the very worst.
And I recognize now that Faith gets a slapped with an Angry Black Woman label, but that my opinion still stands: her moment of anger is entirely justified. I don’t like what happens to her in the first half of this book, but there will be other novels. Because this is a series, we get to see Faith as far more: she gets to be practical, cool, and funny. She becomes a photographer for the school newspaper. She gets a boyfriend who she worries about because he wants to be a cop. She goes to college. She has a story.
I’m glad that young me got to grow up with Faith, but I wish she’d had a more sympathetic writer—nowadays, these books would not be enough. Even if I don’t like the outcome of this particular episode—even if I don’t like the frame—I can acknowledge that much of it is true to life.
I read Margaret Atwood’s 1976 novel Lady Oracle first as a seventeen-year-old, then as an earnest literature undergraduate.
In this feminist satire, acclaimed Canadian poetess Joan Foster fakes her own death and flees to Italy in disguise when her multiple identities collide. Not only is Joan a sort of red-headed Enya of the literary world, she’s also the writer of numerous Gothic governess romances and (in her mind this is the worst crime) a former fat kid.
The book is told in first person, interspersing flashbacks to an unhappy youth and marriage with excerpts of the “Costume Gothics” that Joan writes. Joan grows up with an angrily controlling mother who tries to get her obese teenage daughter to lose weight. A legacy from a beloved aunt allows her to flee to London, where she first meets a Polish count who churns out Betty Neels-type nurse-doctor romances and introduces her to a career as a romance novelist. She has a chance meeting with Arthur, a drippy young Socialist, who becomes her husband. The pair end up back in Canada, where Arthur adjuncts, agitates, and doles out contempt for his wife while she supports him with her secret writing.
The Royal Porcupine wears spats and a cape and hooks Joan by negging her.
Then, while hashing out a paranormal storyline, Joan tries Automatic Writing. (This involves staring into a candle and letting the spirit take her pen.) After several sessions, she finds that she has written a strange manuscript which Joan’s new literary publishers gleefully sell. Correction: they sell Joan as a tragic-feminist-spiritualist-redheaded poetess.
Joan’s husband becomes unhappy with her success (and the fact that the book seems to be about a stifling marriage). She stumbles into an affair with a performance artist who styles himself as “The Royal Porcupine.” The Royal Porcupine wears spats and a cape and hooks Joan by negging her. (The dystopian fantasy A Handmaid’s Tale is regarded as Atwood’s most prescient novel, but props to Lady Oracle for identifying proto-pickup artists.) But the pressure from juggling her secret lives comes to a head when a hanger-on of the arts scene threatens to blackmail her, threatening to spill about her affair, her secret life as a romance novelist, and her former heft.
It didn’t have anything to do with my life, I thought. And yet, shortly after reading Lady Oracle as a seventeen-year-old, I sent a self-addressed stamped envelope to Harlequin for their guidelines on writing romance novels.
I am having a hard time piecing together what I felt about Lady Oracle as a youth under the weight of what I think of it now.
I should note that, like Joan, I have at least two names: I’ve had one literary novel and two romance novels published, but I’m open about my identities (and—erm—am not successful under either of them). There is no danger that I’ll flee North America only to turn up at an Italian pensione with my luxuriant tresses chopped off.
When I was younger, though, and still struggling with one identity, I think I found Lady Oracle funny? Zany? I especially enjoyed the parody of Joan’s so-called Costume Gothics. It didn’t have anything to do with my life, I thought. And yet, shortly after reading Lady Oracle as a seventeen-year-old, I sent a self-addressed stamped envelope to Harlequin for their guidelines on writing romance novels.
I told people that I was writing a romance novel for money, although why I told people anything at all, I don’t know. Like Joan, I was secretive.
My working title was “Worlds Apart.” The heroine, Lancie, was a food critic who was planning to attend cooking school in Italy. The hero—I don’t remember his name, so we’ll call him Jim—was an architect who was moving to China. They met, in the first chapter, at the travel agency run by Lancie’s sister.
Lancie had black hair and brown eyes. I never said explicitly that she was of Asian descent—probably because I didn’t admit it in my mind, either. The novel ended with Jim rushing to Tuscany, having sacrificed his plans to create a Beijing subdivision—having sacrificed for love. I suppose this was my version of a feminist ending.
I told people that I was writing a romance novel for money, although why I told people anything at all, I don’t know. Like Joan, I was secretive. I got maybe 20,000 words in before my dad sold our secondhand Mac (honestly, the real love story was between me and that cheery little computer) and switched us to PC.
“Worlds Apart” wasn’t the first book I’d tried to write. The idea of money attracted me, but that wasn’t really why I needed to do it. But it was the first attempt where my real motives for writing seemed hidden even from me.
At every turn, Joan thinks she’s a fraud. But that’s also partly because at every turn there is someone dismissing her accomplishments, telling her she doesn’t deserve love, thoughts, success, her life.
Lady Oracle is not kind. It is not kind to people, to genre fiction. Nor is it kind to high literary work.
It skewers romance, of course, trotting out the usual stuff: the audience is made up of sexually unsatisfied (white) women. Joan reads romance novels but calls them “trashy books.” The writers and publishers feel contempt for their readers. Joan says, “I made the necessary revisions and received my first hundred pounds, with a request for more material. Material, they called it, as if it came by the yard.”
In Joan’s (or Atwood’s) vision, writers of romance novels are prized for the quantity of work they can produce rather than the quality. (There has been speculation that Atwood herself has written romance novels.) At the same time, however, the quality of literary publishing seems to be a myth. When Joan meets with her imprint, Colin Harper, a beleaguered editor, seems less than impressed with the book. Doug Sturgess, the publisher, has dollar signs in his eyes.
“We thought it was—ah—reminiscent—of a mixture of Kahlil Gibran and Rod McKuen,” said Colin Harper unhappily.
“Oh, I said. “It’s that bad, is it?”
“Bad?” said Sturgess. “Is she saying bad? You know how many copies those guys sell?”
Harper thinks the book is cheesy. Sturgess, with book covers and TV appearances in mind, wants to know if Joan plays the guitar. To her romance publishers, words are material. To her literary publishers, Joan is the material.
Throughout the book, it’s clear that the products of women aren’t valued.
“I have read your [poetry] book,” Count Paul, failed literary writer/author of nurse-doctor romances, tells Joan. “It is promising, I think, for a first book, by a woman.”
The qualifications Count Paul appends to his compliment water down any admiration he might have professed. At every turn, Joan thinks she’s a fraud. But that’s also partly because at every turn there is someone dismissing her accomplishments, telling her she doesn’t deserve love, thoughts, success, her life.
By twenty-two, the second time I read Lady Oracle, I’d told myself I didn’t want to write at all. This was my version of managing expectations—by getting rid of them. I’m not going to say that Lady Oracle made me despair. Life did that—it keeps doing that.
I said I wasn’t honest with myself or with others about why I wanted to write a romance novel at seventeen. By twenty-two, the second time I read Lady Oracle, I’d told myself I didn’t want to write at all.
This was my version of managing expectations—by getting rid of them. I’m not going to say that Lady Oracle made me despair. Life did that—it keeps doing that. Besides, I still apparently wanted to try something new after having read it. And well, obviously, I still write.
But the prevailing feeling I’ve had reading it this time around has been one of recognition. I’ll be honest: rereading Lady Oracle was a mind-fuck, partly because I saw myself in it and partly because I wasn’t even in it at all. If the message for women is that their work can be discounted because it is done by women, then what do we say to women who are not white?
In 2016, forty years after the publication of Lady Oracle, there is a lot more talk—in the world, in publishing—about the need for writers, editors, agents, reviewers, who are not heterosexual cis white men.
I’ll be honest: rereading Lady Oracle was a mind-fuck, partly because I saw myself in it and partly because I wasn’t even in it at all.
I am grateful for the work I’m getting this year. (Seriously BMP, thank you!) But while I am delighted that I get to write, there is always someone—from within, from without—trying to keep me in a confined space.
Writing about diversity—God, how I’ve come to hate this term!—in Kirkus last month, romance reviewer Bobbi Dumas exhorted, “I hope you’ll consider reading outside of your own comfort zone.”
Your own comfort zone.
A lot has already been made across the Internet about this piece and Tweets by a prominent white literary agent about getting that diversity in—as if it’s an onerous duty, as if all audiences are white, as if diverse stories are bitter, medicinal, and fundamentally unappealing to white sensibilities. (For one rebuttal, check Courtney Milan’s response in the comments to Ms. Dumas’s piece.)
I prefer not to think that my writing—or the writing of any WOC—is a pill for anyone to choke on. But so often the writing of WOC is framed this way. Even the praise is qualified. It’s as if Count Paul is there saying,You are promising, I think, for a new writer, who’s a minority hire.
Women’s writing is already seen as insubstantial because it’s by women—but work by POC will also taste bad going down? I don’t want to be a nonwhite writer who is given a berth so that white audiences may absolve their guilt and then move on to the “real” reading. I prefer not to think that my writing—or the writing of any WOC—is a pill for anyone to choke on. But so often the writing of WOC is framed this way. Even the praise is qualified. It’s as if Count Paul is there saying, You are promising, I think, for a new writer, who’s a minority hire.
Enough.
Rather than wallow, this is how finally I have chosen to see Lady Oracle, a satire that veers close to and diverges from my life in many ways.
The thing she’s most eager to hide is the fact that she was once big. She still has heft—she is substantial. The thing she wants to hide is that she is bigger than all who surround her.
Joan thinks she’s a fraud. But while Joan says she’s an impostor, she’s an unreliable narrator in another completely different way: while she’s busy telling us that she deserves nothing—that she is so buffeted by circumstance that her own poetry book was penned by invisible spirits—she discounts what she has accomplished. Despite her apparent powerlessness, she’s a woman who escapes her terrible family, invents and reinvents herself, writes seventeen books, supports her husband and his hangers-on, and—even after life starts falling down around her—harbors hope for the future.
What does it say that in the end, the thing that she’s most frantic to hide is not that she’s a successful writer of Costume Gothics? She’s not most intent on preserving her literary reputation or her marriage. The thing she’s most eager to hide is the fact that she was once big. She still has heft—she is substantial. The thing she wants to hide is that she is bigger than all who surround her.
Before Harry Potter sorting hats, before Sex in the City, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club provided readers with a quartet of women with which to classify themselves.
Were you:
a Waverly, the ambitious former chess-champ overachiever?
a Lena, the half-Chinese, half-Irish-American girl who became a passive spectator of her own life?
a Rose, the Asian Juliet who’s married her white Romeo only to never feel quite good enough for her posh in-laws—or for him?
or a June (Jing-mei), failed pianist, failed copywriter, failed everything who never seemed to live up to her mother’s grand expectations?
I thought I was a June when I first read it in university.
Okay, so the book provided me with a way to sort myself—me, and maybe other second-generation readers of Chinese descent. But it must have struck a nerve with a wider population, because Tan’s 1989 novel was wildly successful. The book appeared on public school curricula, and excerpts were used in the SAT. It spawned a movie, for which Tan cowrote the screenplay. There were roles for AT LEAST eight Asian women. Ming Na was June! Rosalind Chao was Rose! In a genius casting move, Andrew McCarthy was Rose’s ex, with echoes of Bland—I mean Blaine, the rich, white milquetoast he played in Pretty In Pink.
People talked about Joy Luck—people talked about it with me. But of course, the book’s popularity was a trap as much as it was a gift, because it meant other people—white people—would classify me along those lines.
They probably thought I was a Waverly.
The book is told in alternating first-person voices. After the death of her mother, Suyuan, June is asked to take her place at the Mah Jong board. June’s “aunties”—the mothers of Waverly, Lena, and Rose—reveal that they have found the twin daughters from Suyuan’s first marriage, who she left behind in China while trying to escape Mao Zedong’s forces. The aunties want June to reconnect with the twins in her mother’s place.
Each mother then begins to recount the things she left behind, and the daughters tell stories of their childhoods and the baggage these mothers brought with them—the psychic weight of each personal history.
Like Lena, I felt like I had Chinese eyes—and while I didn’t see devils, I always felt my parents’ fear, the consequences of things that had happened to them.
It’s funny that I began by focusing on the daughters, because the mothers are equally important in this story. In fact, theirs are the details—theirs is the suffering—that many readers remember. An-mei’s disgraced mother cuts off a piece of her arm to make a soup to feed her own ailing parent. A teenaged Lindo is wedded to a confused and childish groom and abused by a mother-in-law desperate for a grandson. Ying-ying marries a cruel and brutal philanderer and aborts fetus after fetus to avoid ties to the man. Her second husband is a white American man who changes her name to Betty, alters the birth year on her papers, welcomes her passivity, and overlooks her severe depression. And Suyuan, the only one who is not alive to tell her own story, is haunted by her failure to save her twin daughters.
Patriarchy—in case you were wondering—is pretty terrible.
I remember June, Lena, Rose, and Waverly’s stories because those are the ones that had the texture of mine. Like June, I was the kid who fell apart during piano recitals.
I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange humble through two repeats, the sour notes staying with me all the way to the end.
I’m told that most people have naked-at-the-exam dreams. My nightmares involve a piano.
Or, like Lena St. Clair, I was the kid who heard my mom’s tales. I was overwhelmed by her anxiety and depression.
…I began to see terrible things. I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me that I got from my mother. I saw devils dancing feverishly beneath a hole I had dug in the sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children… And when I became older, I could see things that Caucasian girls at school did not.
Like Lena, I felt like I had Chinese eyes—and while I didn’t see devils, I always felt my parents’ fear, the consequences of things that had happened to them. But it was hard to explain the weight of such a different history to the white kids, teachers, and neighbors who surrounded me. For a long time, I didn’t. Because here’s the thing: when there aren’t a lot of stories about people like you, you don’t have a vocabulary to explain it. You don’t have a way to tell people why your mom boils the water before you are allowed to drink it. Why she screams at you when you don’t eat an apple down to the very core before throwing it away, when you use too much paper. The consequences of worry and privation—of large events from distant countries—make it into your daily life. The water in your part of Canada is safe to drink. You are not starving. There is no visible reason for your mother’s behavior. The reason is in a past that your classmates don’t know, that their parents never experienced, that doesn’t seem to figure in books, TV, movies, or conversation, that doesn’t seem to exist.
Maybe part of you doesn’t exist. So why is it so loud?
First reading The Joy Luck Club was a relief—such a fucking relief.
It wasn’t just about wanting to find stories about people who looked like me. It was about making it easier for me to say more about myself and to be myself. It wasn’t so lonely to be that—to be me—if some of me seemed to be in a book. Never mind that Amy Tan was at least a generation older than me, that my parents were from Taiwan, not China, and I lived in Canada, not the United States.
Joy Luck was not the first or last work to tackle East Asian immigrant experiences, but because people knew what it was—white people knew what it was—it was an easy, popular reference point. Joy Luck was what I could use when I needed an illustration of what is had been like to grow up with grandparents who didn’t have twinkling blue eyes and plates of gingerbread on their tables.
But it was just one book. Sometimes that was limiting.
Was I a Waverly, a June, a Lena, or a Rose?
Sometimes, it was just easiest to choose from what I was given. Was I ungrateful if it wasn’t enough?
When there aren’t a lot of stories about people like you, you don’t have a vocabulary to explain it.
“It didn’t reflect my experience,” my friend Desirée, also second-generation Asian, told me.
Desiree’s family was Filipino Chinese. Mine was from Taiwan. Our families were two tendrils on the mass of ivy that was Chinese diaspora.
I remember a few things about that moment. I remember thinking, If you don’t identify with this book, then what else is there?
What else is there?
I remember her pursed lips as she contemplated my paperback copy.
Desiree was such a Waverly, I thought. So particular. So smart.
So—as it turns out—right.
Because now that I know more—now that I’m the age of the daughters in Joy Luck—I realize it wasn’t always my experience either.
It wasn’t just about wanting to find stories about people who looked like me. It was about making it easier for me to say more about myself and to be myself. It wasn’t so lonely to be that—to be me—if some of me seemed to be in a book.
In my earnest, youthful enthusiasm, I told my mom to read the book. My mom was barely keeping it together at that point. I think she may have glared at me before going back to the endless cycle of cleaning, worrying about money, working, and anxiety that characterized her life then.
I’m glad now that she didn’t take me up on it.
There’s a small mention of Suyuan’s mysterious first husband right near the beginning. June is recalling the story her mother tells her about how she ended up on a road, how she had to abandon her twin daughters:
The man who was my husband brought me to Kweilin because he thought we would be safe. He was an officer with the Kuomintang and after he put us down in a small room in a two-story house, he went off to the northwest, to Chungking.
Many, many years after I’d read The Joy Luck Club—read it over and over—I came across that sentence again. “He was an officer with the Kuomintang.”
It’s a throwaway, really. But that is where I got an inkling that this story—the story I’d told myself was mine—was not.
In Tan’s book, the then-ruling political party of China, the Kuomintang, flee Mao. But my family fled the Kuomintang.
I’ve used “Chinese” and “Taiwanese” like they’re interchangeable, but in many ways, they’re not. Both sides of my family had been in Taiwan for hundreds of years. But in 1949, the mainland Chinese Kuomintang fled China and ended up governing the island of Taiwan. The Kuomintang would bring martial law to the country. My parents, native Taiwanese, would see some of their family members imprisoned, their goods confiscated, their rights taken away.
I note this not to dredge up old wounds. My mom doesn’t recoil at the mention of the KMT. She is friends with people a lot like Suyuan. Being an immigrant in North America often forges ties among people who might have been at loggerheads in other countries, while in Taiwan itself, the various parties coexist, intermarry, intermingle. But still, the differences in time, in context, made a difference in my family’s history, in what we were and are.
I erased some of those differences when I didn’t look further than Joy Luck—I erased a part of myself. I can still identify with Rose, Lena, Waverly, June, and with Suyuan, Lindo, An-mei, and Ying-ying. But now I know more. I’ve read more, and I want more.
It’s not a desire to just see myself, or to see that I exist, that makes me seek out books by authors of many races and backgrounds now. I want to reach out, and I want to be reached. Yes, young me could have used more books, more different kinds of books, more characters of my own and other races, more children and rebellious teenagers and adults kissing, or solving mysteries or navigating the lunchroom, or fighting dragons. My friends could have used more stories that helped them talk to me and me talk to them.
My mom could have used books. Because there was so much she couldn’t voice—so much more to her than anxiety, and anger, and depression, and mothering—and I know she felt alone.
It’s not a desire to just see myself, or to see that I exist, that makes me seek out books by authors of many races and backgrounds now. I want to reach out, and I want to be reached.
My parents visited me recently. It was, for a number of reasons, tense.
They heard me reading Dumpling Days by Grace Lin to my daughter. It’s a wry and insightful semi-autobiographical novel (aimed at middle grades) about a Taiwanese-American girl’s mixed experiences during a visit to her parents’ homeland. My daughter loves it and wants to read from it almost every night.
My mom snagged it—sometimes, she and my daughter pulled it from the others’ hands—and sped through it in a matter of days.
When she was done, she came to me with a sad smile on her face. “When you went to Taiwan, did you feel this way?” she asked hesitantly.
There was more to the question. Did you hate it? Or perhaps, Did you hate this part of me?
“I was older, and I knew the language,” I told her, “so it was different for me.”
But I told her that the book filled in gaps. It told me a stories that I didn’t know and gave me answers for questions I didn’t know to ask.
My mom nodded. We didn’t really talk about it again.
But when I read more to my daughter, my mom was listening, sometimes correcting my pronunciation, laughing, sometimes just standing still. And the story, for that brief moment, held all three of us together.
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