The Chinese-American Dream: A Dragonwings Reread
Book bans prioritizing feelings over facts are frustrating.
“This book is not appropriate for any American student,” Coleman wrote last month in his request for review of “Dragonwings.”
He and others who called for its removal during a Blount County school board meeting this month cite the novel’s use of the terms such as “white demon,” curse words, violence, drug use and prostitution in describing the experience of an 8-year-old boy and his family in San Francisco in the early 1900s.
They also say it violates a state law passed last year that lists 14 “prohibited concepts” in instruction, such as that one race or sex is inherently superior to another or that an individual’s moral character is determined by race or sex.
Coleman said if a line is not drawn in the sand, “We’re going to continue down the woke CRT agenda.”
The unspoken thing that Coleman says here, is that if Chinese American history is inappropriate for American students, that means people of Chinese descent aren’t American to him. Dragonwings is a Newberry Honor Book published in 1975 (so it was likely in the school libraries of many of the parents complaining today), and it follows a young boy starting at age 8 in 1903 through 1909 as he arrives in America to reunite with his father, working to send money home and also on his father’s dream to create a flying machine (loosely inspired by actual Chinese American pilot Fung Joe Guey). Life is hard, but there is also joy, and camaraderie with friends in absence of family overseas.
Per my own reading logs because I never threw them away, I actually DID read Dragonwings for the first time in sixth grade, and decided to revisit it in light of parental complaints, and I’m more frustrated with where these angry parents put their energy.
Dragonwings wasn’t required reading for me in sixth grade; I read it on my own. As part of Laurence Yep’s Golden Mountain Chronicles, it remains the pivotal middle grade series that introduced me to much of my own history. The Chinese Exclusion Act looms large as the first and only immigration law restricting a specific nationality, and even after its repeal in 1946, immigration was based on the quota system which permitted entry of only a few hundred of Chinese annually.
I have a sneaking suspicion these Tennessee parents are mad specifically because Moon Shadow and his family call white people “demons”, and this might be the first time they’ve been Othered (and if they’re of an evangelical bent, being associated with demonic intent is particularly triggering). I wonder if they ever considered the context, though: on the very first page when Moon Shadow mentions that his father is working in America, the land of the white demons, he mentions that his grandfather was lynched by these demons. This week federal legislation finally passed marking lynching as a hate crime, which is way too late for thousands of victims, including one of the biggest lynchings in 1871 in Los Angeles where 19 Chinese men were killed (and while eight people were prosecuted, their convictions were overturned). Demon is probably Yep’s interpretation of gweilo, which is slang but white people take it personally, perhaps because it’s the first time an epithet’s been applied to them.
There’s a quote that I’ve seen make the rounds (originally by Ozy Aloziem), and it’s “White privilege is your history being part of the core curriculum and mine being taught as an elective,” and it’s painfully obvious here. I had to read these books on my own recreational time, but by putting it in the curriculum educators can cover the Chinese Exclusion Act (and how immigration laws change in the United States), the Wright Brothers, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (and how resources are not evenly shared in disasters). The current rightwing fervor over teaching materials serves our students poorly, glossing over the very real historic iniquities that continue to affect communities today.
Coincidentally, I had also checked out Three Keys by Kelly Yang at the library, the sequel to 2018’s Front Desk. This series is also historical fiction but set in the ‘90s (every time I type that, I wince and wrinkle a little), but many of the concerns Moon Shadow had about moving to a new country are shared by Mia Tang even though a century separates them. Locally, Front Desk was an Oregon Battle of the Books pick for 2020-2021 so I know for sure it showed up in schools!
My home state of Idaho looks to take the censorship of undesirable literature further by proposing legislation that would fine librarians for providing “obscene/harmful” material to minors. The article also has this unintentionally funny quote from a concerned parent:
Another parent said she had filed a formal complaint against the West Ada School District over the book “Gender Queer: A Memoir.”
“The school does not need to teach our children how to do oral sex,” she said. “That’s my job.”
Maybe that is the parental job here, shielding their children from the same resources that could illuminate their ignorance. I won’t link to the petition set up by the Blount County parents (there’s 140 digital signatures), but the comments are disheartening.
One person says this book should be removed and replaced with a classic (again, Dragonwings is a Newberry Honor Book, and was published 47 years ago, so by various metrics it IS a classic.
An anonymous comment references the CCP, even though the novel is written by an American, and takes place between 1903 and 1909, well before the CCP was founded. This perpetuates the idea that Chinese Americans are perpetual foreigners linked to current regimes, even though the diaspora is vast.
Multiple comments say that including Dragonwings is “indoctrination”, which is interesting given in the Author’s Note at the end, Yep said he wanted to counter various stereotypes as presented in the media. “Dr. Fu Manchu and his yellow hordes, Charlie Chan and his fortune-cookie wisdom, the laundrymen and cooks of the movie and television Westerns, and the houseboys of various comedies present an image of Chinese not as they really are but as they exist in the mind of White America. I wanted to show that Chinese-Americans are human beings upon whom America has had a unique effect. I have tried to do this by seeing America through the eyes of a recently arrived Chinese boy, and by presenting the struggles of his father in following his dream.” These parents would rather limit their children’s worldview.
And that is what I find MOST frustrating about this: because Dragonwings was in core curriculum, it placed Chinese American history as American history. While I have a personal connection to these stories, having this taught means I don’t need to perform the emotional labor of educating friends/acquaintances/strangers about Asian American history (or why our immigration policy feels so cyclical). I joke to myself that there’s an internal “Days since Danielle mentions the Chinese Exclusion Act” ticker for my posts, but it really is something that affects not only my worldview, but others around me whether they realize it or not. That perception that Asian Americans are “recent” stems from the largest waves arriving after immigration law changes in 1965 after over a century of restrictions. Not including it in curriculum ensures students remain as ignorant as their parents (which is perhaps the goal, if these specific parents want to be the gatekeepers to their children’s education).
The other frequent accusation is that presentation of American racism is racist in itself, which baffles me. There is a section of the population that seems to think being perceived as racist is worse than actual racist policies perpetuated by racist ideas. I even encountered this today, begging someone to review their actions which they promptly assumed to be character attacks. It is the consistent prioritization of the majority’s comfort and sense of self over the actual harms perpetrated against the minority. If you feel uncomfortable reading a book where the Chinese Americans see most white people as violent threats, is it because you identify with the antagonists instead of the protagonists? Have you considered the recent surge in hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans (and continued violence against Black and Jewish communities)? If it isn’t acceptable for your child to read about it, is it acceptable for my potential children to experience it?
Please contact your congress critters and school boards, pushing back against the whitewashing of curriculum.