In terms of actually seeing Asian American characters, I think I was a little too old by the time The Baby-Sitters Club had become popular, but I remember noticing, you know, Claudia Kishi, and she was Japanese American, but I remember thinking oh, there’s a girl who looks like me on the cover. I remember actually it wasn’t until my twenties, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club – I’m not Chinese American, I didn’t grow up in San Francisco, but there were a lot of Asian American issues in that book that I was like oh, this is cool. And I remember seeing the movie, and I did not know that it would be 25 years until Crazy Rich Asians before we saw another major Hollywood movie with an all-Asian, Asian American cast with a family and all of that.
So, I found that a little discouraging, but I remember going to see The Joy Luck Club and thinking okay, I’m not Chinese, but it’s just kind of cool to see people, you know, who look like me and talk like me. And, in fact, I think there’s a character who doesn’t speak Mandarin, you know. She’s like me, she speaks total American. So, I thought that was very important to me.
I think also Chang-rae Lee, who was a famous adult Korean American novelist, his books really spoke to me as well. It was like oh, you know, our stories do matter. He’s being published by a major publisher. He’s winning all these awards. That’s really cool.
So, I would say my seeing people who looked like me or people who were actually of Korean descent, that happened much later in life, and there was a lot of catch-up. I had to kind of do my own independent Asian American studies course, if you will. You know, I would go to that tiny little Asian bookshelf at Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore, and I just would pull out every single book that I could, just going okay, you know, I don’t know this person, I don’t know this piece of history, I want to read all about it.
