Category: Uncategorized

  • Asian Pacific American Heritage Month: Childhood Stories

    Asian Pacific American Heritage Month: Childhood Stories

    By: Lexi Plumley

    As a Filipino American, there weren’t a lot of Filipino children’s books. There were books that had our folk tales and certain ghost stories, but they weren’t for children. Aunties and uncles would tell you these stories, grandparents would tell you these stories verbally, but there weren’t really any, physical picture books when I was growing up in the 90s. I do remember there were two instances where I ended up reading the same book during different times in my life.

    I don’t think there was a single physical book that I ever got to read throughout my entire childhood that had to do with anything of Asian descent. Everything was white or black. I read a lot of black children’s stories growing up, but I didn’t get to read anything whatsoever from my Filipino heritage. [Storytelling] was done through family members or other Filipino people who also had the same type of stories, just told differently. Again, they’re all folk tales from our culture.

    I was in fifth grade and heard somebody read this book called, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr. It’s a Japanese children’s book about the events that happened in Hiroshima, where a bunch of kids who had radiation poisoning were in hospitals. There are a lot of terrible things [in the story], but it was painted very beautifully. The book is about a girl who got very, very sick. In Japanese culture, if you make a thousand paper cranes, you get to make a wish. I remember reading that when I was in fifth grade, and I thought the story was wonderful. It was the first time I’d seen an Asian person in a book. I was like, “This is wild!”

    In seventh grade, in junior high, I took a creative writing class, and they read the exact same book. As we were reading the book and learning the history about those events, we were supposed to make a thousand cranes to then send to Japan. This was to put the cranes at her monument because she was a real person who went through these things. She was trying to make the thousand cranes, but didn’t end up finishing them before she passed on. I think her classmates and things decided to make that monument, and there’s a giant statue of her holding a paper crane in that city.

    Every year for the anniversary of either her death or the events that happened, people bring a bunch of paper cranes to the monument and place them there. That’s what we did as a group of eight 12-year-olds. We made a thousand paper cranes. Our creative writing teacher, Mr. Jacobs, sent them to Japan.

    They [the people of Hiroshima] sent us back a letter and a picture of our cranes sitting at this at the base of the monument. Sadako became my favorite book. It is something that I always suggested to people. When I was a preschool teacher, I read it to my kids even though they were way too young to really understand the gravitas of the book. The fact is that there wasn’t any Asian representation in my class, so as a teacher, so I wanted to present that to the kids. I showed them how to make paper cranes.

    I’ve talked to a lot of other Filipino friends of mine that are all in the same age range. We all read that same book. Sadako is the first Asian book that we ever read growing up, and we’re all in our mid-thirties now.

    I didn’t start really seeing books about Filipino children or Filipino culture until I was in college. I think the first one was the most famous Filipino American children book, Cora Cooks Pancit, by Dorina Lazo Gilmore. I was 18 or 19 at the time.

    I have to look and see where Asian stories are in our library system, because we should have more of those. I’ve seen ones explaining Lunar New Year, but there should be more books, more children’s books, especially for Filipino Americans. I feel like we have a lot more Chinese, Japanese, and Thailand books, and ones from India too. We’re lacking in the Filipino department, and it makes me sad.

    —

    By: Maria Lagasca

    I’m going to tell you the first book where I felt seen as not only an Asian girl, but an Asian girl who didn’t speak English very well. English is not my first language. It’s always been a struggle for me. The first book I ever read, and still read once a year, is called In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Bette Bao Lord. It’s a little chapter book. On the cover, at the top, is a picture of Jackie Robinson, and at the bottom is a little Asian girl listening to a baseball game on the radio.

    It’s a really good book. It’s set after World War 2, and he girl, named  Shirley Temple Wong,  is in middle school. She immigrates to Brooklyn, New York from China, and she does not speak English very well. On top of that, she doesn’t have a support system besides the people in her classroom.

    Shirley doesn’t have formal instruction in English. She learns from the people around her. She struggles to fit in and deal with some of the stereotypes and some of the economic stress that most immigrants face. And yeah, she’s sassy! That’s what I loved about her. She’s bullied, but one thing she knew was to stick up for herself. She didn’t need English for that.  

    She ends up befriending and forgiving the bully. I don’t know. In the Asian culture, you don’t bow down. I was raised to be proud of who I was and to never be fearful, even though I was [afraid], so the idea of forgiving a bully was very new to me. Shirley ends up being friends with the bully, and they end up playing baseball.

    Another thing I liked about her was that she was a tomboy. She ended up playing baseball, which is what I did. I had two brothers. I got their hand-me-downs. I did whatever my brothers did, and I ended up gravitating towards sports. She made me feel very seen, and the mini stories of her parents not being able to navigate the grocery store and her having to go with her mom to translate. She doesn’t know English very well, but she’s the hope for her family. It’s like a burden for her. It’s something I think

  • Dauphin County Library Staff and the Impact of Literature

    Dustin Brinton-Wilson, District Consultant

    I remember reading Ezra Jack Keats books, like Snowy Day, very early and casually thinking, “oh, there’s a character that looks like me.”

    However, the first impactful book for me was reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy in fifth or sixth grade. I remember feeling the unfairness and a sense of hopelessness in the early part of the book being experienced by a kid my age and really thinking about what I would do in his situation. It certainly made me start to think about a lot of issues and concerns that I hadn’t before.

    Honorable mention: Reading Stephen King’s It in high school. A central, significant character, Mike, was written as a black character who wasn’t a jock, was nerdy and studious, and later became the librarian of the town. All unusual character traits to ascribe to a black character in the mid 1980’s, that eerily described me.

    Tynan Edwards, Programming & Outreach Administrator

    The first one I remember is one that my dad read to me. Oddly enough, I later found out it was written by a white woman. The book was Galimoto.  It was a book about a seven-year-old African boy. He built a Galimoto, which is a toy vehicle made from scraps of wire. I think he builds a bike, and he carries it around all day.

    It’s it always stuck with me because I think it was the first time I heard of another person building a toy, and it was something that, culturally, I’d never like, oh, we just built a toy out of wires. Like, it was a very interesting little book. I think the illustration stuck with me as much as anything, honestly.

    I remember it from, Reading Rainbow. It was one of the first books, that I read or at least that I think my dad read to me where the characters were obviously nonwhite.

    I think I mentioned the other day when we were speaking, an author named Brian Pinkney and his father, Jerry Pinkney. They’re two African American illustrators, and I think Brian Pinkney is a writer as well, an author. And their illustrations are like scratch. I don’t know enough about art to know the type of illustration, but the illustrations for his books always stuck with me.

    Then there’s a book called The Faithful Friend. It was a tale of friendship between, I think, a Dominican person and a white person in the French West Indies.

    That was probably the first time I saw someone biracial in a book, which was, especially growing up in Central Pennsylvania, super important to me. I was that weird in-the-middle kid.

    My father did a great job of presenting those books to me and my brother because he thought it was important. He’s also an English teacher for 26 years, so he had the inside track of getting books that he knew were important, having done it for so long.

    I remember it was the first book I ever bought at a book fair as a kid. It was The Dark 30. It was 30 southern tales of the supernatural. It was all African American ghost stories; thrillers that occurred throughout slavery and the Civil Rights movement in the South. I would have been somewhere between seven and ten when it came out.  I can’t stress how much I love the illustrations in that book.

    I liked ghost stories as a kid, so I loved Goosebumps, but I think [this] was the first time it was a cultural telling of a ghost story rather than just a scary story for little kids. That book made me want to learn more about southern black culture.

    Nekesha Johnson, Public Services Assistant

    I was always a musical child, so for me, the book was Just the Two of Us by Will Smith. I would say I was at least five or six years old. At that time more books were starting to include black boys, and then slowly trickling in, for the black girls too.

    That was the book for me because my dad and I loved music so much. We read that to tatters. I would be like, “Dad, can you read the story? Can you read the story?” He would, and then he’d play the song and we’d sing it together.

    And it was like, oh my gosh. This was one. And then the other one when I got older was the book called Dancer by Laurie Hewitt. It’s about a girl who wanted to become a ballerina. It is a thicker book. A book for teens.

    When I was younger, I wanted to be a dancer. I went to the tryouts and noticed I was a little bit bigger than the other girls. The dance instructor was like, “Yeah, you’re not gonna cut it.” I was sad, but reading that book helped me understand that even if I was not cut out for dancing, I wanted to be as dedicated as the dancer in the book. She was fighting adversities left and right. I was so inspired by it. It taught me resilience.

    One book I also liked was a poetry book called Crowning Glory by Joyce Carol Thomas. that helped me fall in love with poetry. My favorite genre of poetry was free verse. It didn’t have to rhyme. No rules. It was just me expressing what I felt.  Representation means something to a child.

    Jasmine Conway, Public Services Assistant

    I think I was about five when my grandmother gave me a paperback book that, a paperback picture book that had, a black girl with a yellow dress playing in a field of flowers.

    I don’t remember the title of the book or really what it was about. I just remembered thinking, “Her hair is like mine, and her dress looks like the one my grandma made me.” I wasn’t quite old enough to read it and understand it completely, so my grandmother read it to me. I just have the vivid memory of a girl wearing a yellow dress and playing in the wildflowers.

    The second one that I remembered was getting Addy, the American Girl book, but that was year later when I was around nine. I definitely remember most of that story. When I first read it, it had a deep impact on me because of history and her being a runaway slave.

    Later, I mostly got into Goosebumps and stuff like that. There weren’t descriptions of the characters in those books. There weren’t any pictures. The characters became what I imagined them to be, so they became a rainbow of different people depending on their personalities.

    I also had a lot of Sesame Street books growing up. A lot of them were learning and life lessons and that sort of thing. Sesame Street always had their rainbow of friends in the neighborhood and stuff like that. It was like both the monsters and the humans were blending together. It made an impact.

    Dwana Pinchock, Marketing & Public Relations Manager

    I was an avid reader as a child. The Weekly Reader was everything to me as a young child. Until I was in fifth grade, the only Black people I had seen in books were drawings of enslaved people in a copy of Frederick Douglass Fights for Freedom I had ordered from Scholastic Books. I remember how the drawings made me cry because that was the only time I had seen someone with brown skin like me in a book.

    Then, the last issue of Weekly Reader before summer break came out and I found the book Zeely. I was ecstatic. I saw a little girl who looked like me on the cover — a little black girl with pigtails like mine who was living in modern times. She was curious and a little bit of a detective, just like I wanted to be. I read that book until it literally fell apart. After reading that book for the millionth time, wishing the story would never end, it dawned on me that maybe I could be a writer too. I could create my own stories.

    That summer, I discovered the poems of Gwendolyn Brooks and Maya Angelou, and I was hooked. There was no turning back. A writer was born!

  • Transparent Language Online

    Whether you’re a true language learning beginner, dusting off your old high school Spanish, or eager to tackle your tenth language—Transparent Language Online will help you get started and stick with it. Learn any of the 120+ languages offered.