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Great topic!

I had a nice discussion of depicting surface culture versus deep culture on the Ron Empress blog: http://ronempress.blogspot.com/2010/09/jeannie-lin-guest-blogger-deep-culture.html

Now I'm off to read up on your links.

Looking at the questions above: I wanted to add a note about my editor, because she's a rock star. And Harlequin as a publisher takes a lot of flack. When discussing one of my projects, my editor mentioned how she'd been reading up on Asian literature and watching film. My problem constantly is that I want to be subtle and distance my characters. I do that on purpose -- I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing, but I don't think it's authentic for characters to reveal themselves outright. No one is THAT in tune with their feelings or that willing to admit it, even to themselves. It's the worst when I portray Asian males. My editor pointed out that it seems to be a common practice in Asian lit. That it seems almost too rude to go too deep into a character's motivation and emotions. But in romance, deep emotion is key, right? So we went through several rounds of edits with me working to keep the authentic tone and feel that I wanted and my editor working to make the story accessible and enjoyable for mainstream genre readers. No racebending, no requests for more or less cultural detail. Just a navigation and negotiation on both sides to bring out the story. I have a lot of respect for her because of that.

As a white woman who grew up overseas (Germany, Honduras, Brazil when I was teeny tiny) this is one of the hardest things I find about writing. How do you write about a subculture that doesn't have good language descriptors?

I have read each link you've tweeted this morning, and while right now I'm writing non-fiction, time and place and "deep culture" are important there too.

xo,
Suzi

What great questions, Mitali: thank you for asking, as always.

Whether I’m moving across centuries or cultures, I usually find a way in through details. For me that means lots of reading and looking at pictures. When my first picture book, Aani and the Tree Huggers, was accepted by Lee and Low, my editor asked if I’d been to India. I had not, but took her question as a compliment to my scouring of pictures to know the sorts of plants and trees that grew south of the Himalayas, imagining their sounds and smells. I researched customs and blended in my own fears and feelings about beloved trees.

Borrowed Names: Poems about Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie and their Daughters (Holt, 2010) is about three mother-daughter pairs with histories of covered wagons and farms, cotton plantations, and an academic family in Poland. I wanted to show what they had in common as well as what was different, so again, I read a lot about the particular families, the places they came from, and some social history. Yes, there’s so much you can get wrong, and I think it’s best to move forward with humility and a sense of the importance of trying to find connections. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s hands must have been roughed from saws and hoes, Madam Walker’s from years of doing laundry then tending hair, and Marie Curie’s fingertips were burned from radium. Moving from what I learned about breakfasts, clothing, views from windows, my questions became more universal: how does it feel to turn thirteen? How can you leave someone you love?

So helpful, thanks, Jeannie and Jeannine. (If the next comment comes from someone named Jean, I'll get spooked.)

Just to spook you, Mitali,I had to post here. But I'll also be following the comments with interest. I'm wondering how writers avoid stereotypes when creating characters that cross cultures or class. Thanks for opening this discussion.

I can't answer the editor question (yet!), but the research has been amazing. I am probably doing way too much, without the filtering ability I'd like to have, but I'm trying to find possibilities as well as certainties. There are facts and there are data, but I find myself responding to the one case in 100 where the people took a different route, made a less-typical choice. And I want, somehow, to get those choices in as well as the more common, more known ideas about cultures & people in the past.

If that makes sense. :)

Hi Mitali - this is a subject near and dear to my heart! With LEAVING GEE'S BEND I did not get any pressure/demand for more research, but I sure heaped that pressure on myself. I believe writing across culture is one way to create a more empathetic, compassionate world -- but it's not an easy road! A guiding force for me continues to be writer Julius Lester. I blogged about it here: http://irenelatham.blogspot.com/2010/05/dear-julius-lester.html

Hi Mitali, Are you coming to the SCBWI New England Conference? This is what I will be talking about, and I'd love you to be part of the conversation.
My workshop: What is a writer to do if you are interested in exploring cultural traditions outside of your own? Are you celebrating or exploiting, and where is the border between the two? Using my books and those of others, we’ll talk about authors being type-cast, unintentional racism; and the thin line between stereotype and truth.

Mitali, your post is timely for me as I work on my second round of revisions for my debut middle grade novel, FLYING THE DRAGON, to be published next July by Charlesbridge.

One of my main characters is a boy from Japan, and the other is a Japanese-American girl. While I lived in Japan for 2 years, I certainly don't consider myself an expert on Japanese culture, and definitely not an expert in the Japanese language. I've drawn some of my characters' emotions from my ESL students who come from all over the world, and have tapped my own childhood memories of what it felt like to move from place to place (including one foreign country). The feeling of being the new kid and wanting to fit in is something that kids from all cultures feel.

But in order to get the Japanese cultural details right in my manuscript, I've asked two Japanese women who now live in the U.S. to read through my manuscript. I've been pleased with the things I've gotten right, and filled with relief at the things they've caught that, thankfully, will never make it to print. No matter how much I research (and I'm talking hours and hours and hours), I don't think there's any substitute for handing your manuscript over to someone who comes from the culture about which you're writing.

Mary Anne Mohanraj's words ring true to me: "Your library of characters contains the whole human race, and you have both the right and the responsibility to portray any member of it in your work. You just do your best to get it right."

Here's hoping I'll get it right.

I wrote a book about an ancient Fremont Indian. I visited archaeological sites, and got my hands on every book I could find about them (not much), then I researched the descendant tribes, the Ute, Paiute and Hopi. Once that was done I developed the fictional Nahchee Nation. Http://[email protected]

In my experience, bias against others in reading choices comes from conditioning handed down to a child by their parents and their community. It's not something we're born with; nor it is something we're stuck with our whole lives. As a pasty white, narrowly religious, blonde country girl, I rebelled against the attitude that I should stick to "my own kind" and read widely and diversely in a time when there wasn't much diversity. I read everything from ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY (NOT as part of school reading) to THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS to ELFQUEST to any comic I could find that featured the X-MEN superhero Storm. I know kids who read widely now, too, even though they also come from a pocket of culture that pressures them to stick to their skin color, race, religion, or sexual orientation.

People don't naturally live in boxes; those boxes get built around them when they're still babies. It's up to them to break out of those boxes, and books can be tools that help them do so. The more opportunities publishers give the general populace to read widely and diversely, the more likely it becomes that they will do so.

Thank you so much for mentioning my post. I am a pretty blunt person and I had to let some things out. YA fans come in all shades,but as my cousins and their friends say,it's discouraging to never see anyone who resembles them in the books from this genre. Hopefully,the industry sees that this massive audience(with all that lovely money from mom and dad)are ready and waiting. I am loving your blog and plan on visiting a lot.

YES!!! I was recently feeling so distressed when I was having/witnessing a conversation about whitewashing covers and the common consensus among authors was that whitewashing was a necessity to 'lure' kids to multicultural books. Perhaps I'm naiive to the ways of marketing - but as a mother, a lifelong activist, I can't believe that 'if we build it' (a better, multicultural book world) they (the readers) won't come! Covers which reflect a diversity of faces and experiences is a part of cultural change work too... THANK YOU for this post!

This makes me think about the casting for the Hunger Games movie. My heart sunk when I saw they cast a blond, blue-eyed beauty. Katniss is described as having olive skin and dark hair. I will despair if they whitewash the character of Rue. What an opportunity they have lost with the casting!

I live in a multi-cultural Canadian city, and yet, whenever I go to writer's workshops and such, I see all white girls just like me. Specifically, they're 25 to 45 and wear funky glasses. It's such a homogenous group! I think a lot of us are afraid to take on dissimilar protagonists. There are so many ways to be shot down as a beginner writer already! But thank-you for blogging about the issue. I hope it gives many writers lots to think about and results in more diversity on the shelf.

Just put this on my TBR list!

Synchronicity!! I'm about halfway through this one now, and I'm on the edge of my seat worrying about Asha getting kicked out of school. This is about race, parental pressure, friends going different ways, and more. Good one!

Ooh, thanks for the reminder - I ordered this one, but it hasn't come in yet. Time to start bugging the acquisitions clerk.

Thank you so much, Mitali! :) I'm so glad you enjoyed it. And I'm really pleased that the humor comes across. It's a tough balance!

Ha! I was puzzling over this as I made some edits today because I describe my character as having a perpetual tan so everybody just thought he was outside all the time. But that's how I would describe myself. I never call myself a race because I'm mixed. When I fill out forms, I check most of the boxes because they apply. So what's the answer, Mitali? Tell me!!

Isn't it a crazy world where one of your primary descriptors has to be "mixed"?

My own self-labeling differs depending on my context. Sometimes I'm "Indian," sometimes "Bengali," sometimes "Asian American," sometimes nothing.

Wish we lived in a world where I could just say "I'm human, baby. How about you?" But I wouldn't want to lose the spice of ethnicity, either.

It's a quandary.

I just realized the other day that I'll be putting a mixed-potential-marriage into my 1912 WIP. Something that had been simmering turned into an active choice. Because it's 1912 and because it would very much be an issue at that time, I think I'm going to be able to manage it right out in dialogue--where one friend asks another what she thinks the parents will do/say about...X.

But this is only possible because the nationality/religon was so MUCH of a "problem" back then that it is an impact on the story. I hate having to figure out whether/how to deal with all this when it's part of who the character is, and we want that known, but it's not a focal point, in and of itself, in a scene. Sheesh. :)

I think that each of those labels might work depending on context - In a group of other Indians, I'm often Bengali, but in a group of white Americans, I'm a 'person of color' - and then all the derivations in between. I choose to say Asian-American because I'm consciously announcing my alliance with others of Asian heritage however externally imposed/arbitrary that category is originally. ie. I think sometimes we make purposeful choices to ally with others for sociopolitical reasons, for reasons of solidarity and community that may not be based on anything 'internal' (like language, culture, country of origin) -- but even still I find those alliances really nourishing and important. Of course I also went to Brown University - so a lot of us POC at Brown often called ourselves "browns from Brown"... :) With my kids (who are Bengali-German), the one point I STICK to is that they're not 1/2 anything - they are Bengali AND German AND American AND whatever else. I hate the idea that someone's identity can get reduced to halves! (identity is like love to me, it can't be divided!)

I always wondered if a blond-haired blue-eyed guy from Johannesburg could call himself African American. And I suppose if you're from Israel, you could classify yourself as Middle Eastern.

I have a little bit of a whole bunch of different nationalities in me including English, Russian, Polish, Romanian, and a few other minor things. When it finally comes out that I am also Jewish, it's like that's the answer they were looking for, like I've been stuck in that category.

Jewish isn't even a nationality or a race! Ugh.

It is sad to me that we have to have this discussion at all.

Best retort ever: "I'm human, baby! How 'bout you?" :-)

I was actually asked this by someone who was trying to be more open and helpful with her blog and present multicultural book choices to her readers who were seeking them. She asked me if she should describe the characters by color or something else.

I suggested she just put them in a list and leave it at that. Because really? We're going to get caught up, with something like that, in degrees of multiculturalism... and frankly, we have enough problems.

I have rejected the food meme - nobody in any of my books has chocolatey skin -- but it's tricky sometimes to bring it up, even. It has to be germane to the text, so I try to keep racial things to throwaway lines when a person is in a mirror, or dealing with their very thick curly hair, etc. etc. -- because it matters little to our human story, most of the time, who we are -- to ourselves, at least.

I define myself as African American, and refer to myself as black, except when I'm trying really hard to be PC. ;) I think of my Indian girlfriends as South Asian unless we're being informal, and then they're the Desi Grrlz.

Worse: imagine my sister, who is Cambodian American... and adopted into an African American family. I think the word we're after is multicultural.

A British friend tells me her college professor keeps referring to "African Americans" when he's talking about black Brits -- apparently he's adopted the term without thinking it through. :)

A protagonist or person doesn't have to be just one thing. There can be overlap.

Though I never use Non-white.

For me Black and African American are interchangeable. I use African American when I want to get PC proper with it.

A person's race is an important part of their make up, it should be defined.

I like discussions like this, there's nothing wrong with trying to get racial descriptives right.

I have two pet peeves related to this.

1. When non- Black authors describe their characters as African American.

It's too census formal. To me it says the author isn't used to interacting with Black people on a regular bases.

2. When people say they don't see color when they read.

I always look to my daughter and her friends when I’m writing about kids of various races and cultures. We live in a very multicultural community (in Canada) with a high percentage of people from China, Taiwan, the Philippians, and Indian, so it seems natural that my characters should reflect that cultural mix. When my daughter and her friends were in elementary school, race didn’t seem to be an issue (the kids talked about coming from different countries, but not so much about race). Now that they are in high school, there seems to be more racial identification. Everyone is assumed to be Canadian, so that seems to go without saying, but the kids whose families are from China or Taiwan refer to themselves as “Asian,” the kids whose families came from the Philippians seem to refer to themselves as Philippine or Philippino, rather than Asian, and kids whose families came from India refer to themselves as “Brown” (I’m not sure of the others). My daughter’s ancestry is French, Italian, English, Scottish, Ukrainian and Latvian. Our extended family also includes African ancestry (via Haiti) and Indian ancestry (via Fiji). As a family, we don’t really identify with any one of these ancestral countries (though we try to celebrate or recognize all of them in some way), nor do we identify with the terms “Caucasian” or “White” (though maybe “Caucasian” feels better than being associated with the color or lack of color, “white”), and my nieces and nephews who are “mixed race” don’t seem to identify with one side more than the other (though people who don’t know them sometimes feel the need to categorize them). We also have several friends who are Caucasian and have adopted children from China. Those kids are growing up with different issues of identity.

This may seem simplistic, but what I always taught my daughter and what I try to do in my writing is to see a person first (ie. a girl who has curly black hair, a girl who has orange hair, a boy who uses a wheelchair, etc. instead of a Black girl, a Redhead, a Disabled person, etc.).

It is good to hear what other people have to share on this topic.

I say Asian when I'm talking about our culture in general. I say "I'm Chinese" when I'm making a race joke (about my cheapness or crazy Tiger mother or piano playing or...) I say American when I'm contrasting myself from the FOBs or actual Asians in Asia. I rarely say Asian-American b/c hyphenates are always kind of inherently white-centric, but I'll use it if I'm trying to talk about Asians and As-Ams in one sentence and I need to differentiate.

Thank you! I know, "person of color" really doesn't cut it, does it? So complicated...

This is FABULOUS news. I will share it with eligible pals.

Mitali - we met @ NCTE. I have devoured BAMBOO PEOPLE, your novel I bought there. The boys & their situations feel so real despite being an unknown landscape to me. (The part about being in the ground reminds me of Cool Hand Luke!) You have placed a spotlight on a crucial refugee situation.
I loved the ending.
a favorite character line:
"Your'e a teacher, not a soldier Look at the inky bump on your finger. That's the largest muscle in your whole body."

I look forward to your next projects this year.
warm best
Jan
Jan Godown Annino
www.bookseedstudio.wordpress.com

I DO love it! SO compelling!

I love it! It's so compelling! You can't help but pick it up.

:) Yay.

I think it's gorgeous - but I also liked the HC design. Mostly what I think T's pub did really well here is reach out to a different audience. Folks who might have missed the subtle HC will see the more dramatic PB thus giving her more readers.

Plus I totally think it fits Mare's personality.

Oh yeah. LOVE the new cover!

Like Colleen, I thought this first one was beautiful; I felt very much attention was paid by the artist to the details of the characters particular quirks. The paperback cover is so, SO very different that it allows the book to look interesting to a whole different type of reader - and I think it's the "crossover" cover that might help push it to adults, even. So, there's that.

What do YOU think of it, Mitali?

I absolutely love the new cover. Teens and twenty-somethings alike will be drawn to it. Wow, she's gorgeous.

Wow. I loved that book, and I think the new cover is IT! And usually I'm not a fan of photo covers. What is it about this woman that somehow looks so very modern to me?

You just new I needed a new procrastination technique, didn't you?

And that comment makes loads more sends when Blogger doesn't decide to leave out my fake HTML tags. So with functioning punctuation:

(Scampers off to apply the Mitali Test to her LibraryThing collection.)

I like the "Mitali test" better than the "friends" test! It would be interesting to put together a list. I can think of a few ... several by Beverley Naidoo

LOVE this Mitali! But you're right it needs a name - Mitali Test is excellent. I LOVE the Bechdel test (there's a great series on the "Bechdel test canon" here: http://bit.ly/gu84sT) and now Love its application to race in stories!!! (and I thought you were off line this winter - so happy you came on to suggest this piece of brilliance!)

This is a great test, though it leads to a question: in a book where there aren't races specified, what do we do? Do we assume the characters are the ethnicity/race of the main character? The author?

It would then be interesting to look at the (few) films made with kid casts to see if adaptations change any of this. Regardless, I'd be willing to bet that most books will fail the test.

Great idea. Wow, what if we started asking those questions--about race, about women--every time we watched a movie or read a book?

But what exactly is the purpose of the questions? Is a movie unworthy or second rate if it's all about guys? Or is it just a "guy movie"? Is a book not as good if its mostly or all about white kids? Or is this just a way to see past "token characters" to find books that truly feature people of color and show them as rounded characters?

Sherry, there's absolutely nothing wrong with guy movies or books featuring all white people. This could be just another way for us to SEE what we might otherwise miss, as you put it so well:

"... A way to see past 'token characters' to find books that truly feature people of color and show them as rounded characters."

And remember, I'm only talking about books set in places that are multicultural or diverse enough to warrant two characters of color with names and substantial dialog (unlike the colorful politically correct but dead silent extras cast in TWILIGHT's *rural* Forks high school).

Maybe we can start with the more visual story venues: television and movies targeted for young people. Seen any lately that pass the test?

I had never heard of the Bechdel test. (Thanks for the extra link, Sayantani! I'm going there next.) This is very interesting and gives me a lot to think about, including my fave books. Thanks, Mitali. Great post!

Yes! I've been trying this for a while, and the results are similarly depressing. It also works well when applied to non-cissexuals and non-heterosexual characters in film and literature.

I love this test for how clearly it shows the biases of popular media. It makes it immediately clear that even a film which includes a strong female/homosexual/minority race character is still primarily about straight white men. And the fact that so few of us notice that without this test is a sad sign of our assumptions about what's "normal."

Sherry - in some ways "test" is a misnomer in the Bechdel Test. It's not something a movie/story needs to pass in order to be worthwhile - but, as Rachel says, it shows the biases of the media. Think about the opposite of this test: a story with two white men who talk to each other about something other than race/women. It's ridiculous, because of course most stories pass that version of the test.

This isn't kidlit related, but I will say this is one of the reasons I loved Star Trek: Deep Space Nine so much. Not only does it pass the Bechdel Test, but the new Mitali test, too, since almost every episode would include the captain (African-American) talking to either his son or the doctor (Middle Eastern), with race (as we currently understand it) never mentioned. (Star Trek Voyager passes the Bechdel test in spades, and probably the Mitali test in most episodes, but I wouldn't say every one).

Within the past week or so, someone released a study which listed TV shows that are the most racially offensive. I was surprised to find Grey's Anatomy near or at the top of the list. I watched a recent episode of Private Practice (same producers) and realized that I was caught up in so many emotions while watching the show that there was a lot going on that I missed. Such as the Asian woman who was stereotypically portrait and cold hearted and extremely intelligent. Why was this character Asian while all others were White? Makes me wonder how many other subliminal messages are buried in "news" and entertainment stories that make us feel good. I mean, it seems harmless but we're fed a steady diet of this stuff.
Thanks, Mitali!

I won't get to Emily this week, but I can already tell you that there's so much about so many of Alcott's books that makes me cringe when I read them as an adult. That's not to say that I don't appreciate her for creating Jo March and turning my imagination loose as a child, but she is very much a product of her time, for all she comes from an unconventional family.

Yes, these authors, like us, are products of their times, and that's why I've amended the challenge to focus on the positive. I don't want this to be a critique from the perspective of our time of theirs.

According to a recent biography, Louisa was less of a product of her time than you might think. She didn't even like Little Women, it just made money for her, and a lot of the moralizing stuff was to please an editor. She preferred her potboilers.

Not an authority myself.

I really love An Old-Fashioned Girl! While the language and the ideas are very different from today, Alcott mapped out what she saw as the woman of the future. The quote that stands out for me is this (the context is when Polly and the other characters are looking at a statue that one of them is making of the woman of the future):

"Strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied; that is why I made her larger than the miserable, pinched-up woman of our day. Strength and beauty must go together. Don't you think these broad shoulders can bear burdens without breaking down, these hands work well, these eyes see clearly, and these lips do something besides simper and gossip?"

I think the really powerful thing about this book is that Alcott's vision for women has largely been achieved. I liked it so much that I'm using it as the epigraph for my book, which is based on the philosophy of Little Women.

Sorry to get ahead of the discussion but I'm a serious Alcott lover! I'm reading Emily of Deep Valley right now and will comment on that soon.

Sam
livinglittlewomen.blogspot.com