Burning Down the Little House on the PrairieAsian Pioneers in Contemporary North America
ISSN: 0210-6124
Year of publication: 2011
Volume: 33
Issue: 2
Pages: 27-41
Type: Article
More publications in: Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
Abstract
The Kappa Child (2001) by Japanese Canadian author Hiromi Goto and Stealing Buddah's Dinner (2007) by Vietnamese American Bich Minh Nguyen portray narratives of Asian girls growing up in North America in the pre-multiculturalism decades of the 70s and 80s, when ethnic was not a fashionable term and assimilation into mainstream white culture was any girl's most wanted desire. In both literary texts, the girl narrators are fascinated by American author Laura Ingalls Wilder's narrative of continuous displacement and re-settlement, Little House on the Prairie (1935), and they both become equally disillusioned by the racial and ethnic gaps that make it impossible for them to become true Laura Ingalls in their respective environments. This article attempts to assess the influence of this classic pioneer narrative of (internal) migration on the perception of racialization of these two Asian migrants to North America, on their own critical evaluation of the racism in Ingalls Wilder's texts and on the consequent process of construction of racialized subjectivities by Goto's and Nguyen's narrators.
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