People Like You

[rachelmanija]

There's been tons of discussion of diversity in children's and young adult literature, but I'd like to take it to a more personal level:

When you were a child and teenager, or now, if you're currently a teenager, did you see characters like yourself in the books you read? Do you see characters like yourself now? Did they only appear in limited circumstances, like only as villains, as sidekicks but not heroes, in novels about being persecuted and oppressed but not in more lighthearted fare, only as certain character types, etc? Did it matter to you when you did, or if you didn't?

By "like yourself," I'm thinking of matters of both identity and experience: characters of your race, your nationality, your gender, your sexual orientation, your experiences, etc.

I think you're all quite familiar with my feelings on the matter. I have ranted at great length about how discouraging it was, when I was a teenager, to keep coming across the "trauma destroys you forever" and "people with mental illnesses are doomed" tropes, and how encouraging and helpful it was to later encounter books like Deerskin and Mirror Dance, which said just the opposite. And while it didn't have a serious negative impact on my life that most books I read with Jewish characters were about the Holocaust or other Very Serious Jewish Issues, to this day I erupt in squeals of joy when I encounter a non-stereotyped Jewish character in a non-issue book.

On the flip side, I can think of many, many male-female romances, whether part of genre romance or just part of the story, which I read with great enjoyment. I can only imagine how I would feel if, growing up, I never ever found a book which had a romance of the sort I was actually having or wanted to have. But if I hadn't been straight, that would be the case. The only lesbians I encountered in fiction, up until I was at least a senior in high school, were Agatha Christie's "spinsters," whom I didn't recognize as such until much later, and the woman who traumatizes the straight heroine with a drunken pass in Madeleine L'Engle's A House Like A Lotus.

So you know how I feel. But I'm wondering: how do you feel? What was and is your experience?

Comments

[tool_of_satan]

(I was going to post this on LJ, but it's being cranky.)

I don't recall having much of a problem finding characters like me, but then I wouldn't, given that I was a straight white American male.

I think my main identification was with nerdy boys who weren't particularly interested in sports, but it wasn't a problem finding books with characters like that.

Regular Jewish characters - probably not a lot in books I read, but my memory for these things can be pretty iffy. I remember a lot of books I read as a child, but I know there are plenty I have forgotten the details of, or forgotten entirely. The only specifically Jewish characters I can remember offhand are those in historical books like All of a Kind Family, or that one episode in one of the Great Brain books - not exactly reflecting my experiences. But I don't remember missing that.

[owlectomy]

Most of the characters I came across were white, like me, and from an anglophone culture, like me. I took it for granted that women and men were allowed to have the same kinds of adventures, and read myself into male parts with ease (indeed, in imaginative play with my sister, she would usually be the Token Girl from whatever TV show we were into, and I would be whichever of the remaining male characters I liked best.)

This got sketchy when I started to encounter more serious romance plotlines, and would encounter male viewpoint characters who didn't treat women like human beings, but that's a separate issue.

When I was younger, I was very disappointed by the feeling that the American experience was somehow expected to be universal. I could cope with fantasy worlds and foreign cultures in books, and I could cope with the Little House series, but an author like Beverly Cleary, who tends to write about Generic Suburban America, writes in a setting that's just slightly disorientingly different from Generic Suburban Canada. I started reading Jean Little and L.M. Montgomery when I was ten or so, and I'm still delighted to encounter Canadian characters. This seems very odd to me now, but I think that was the only aspect of my identity where I felt I wanted to see myself in a book and wasn't able to.

As a teenager, I started reading a bunch of Boys Love manga. I didn't particularly identify as having a sexual orientation at that point, and I think my reading was mostly driven by the fact that romance was great and forbidden angsty romance was super-super-great, but now I wonder if characters having same-sex relationships without having to think too hard about their sexual identities ("I'm not gay, I just love you") was kind of a safe space for me. I certainly had zero interest in reading Issue Books about gay teenagers (not that there were many of them, when I was a teen -- though later I found Annie On My Mind, which came out the year I was born, to be dated but very charming.)

[owlectomy]

The other thing is the experience of moving -- I had international moves at 6, 8, and 11, and it seemed like the only narrative of moving that I got in middle-grade/YA books was "At first you miss your friends, but then you find awesome new ones and things are better." With little consideration for the difficulties of navigating an entirely new culture, perhaps an entirely new language, getting teased for your nationality and/or accent, adapting to a car-centric environment when you're used to being able to walk to the corner store. I wanted to see someone acknowledge how utterly awful it can be, and not something to be solved with the inevitability of meeting new friends.

[movingfinger]

I've wondered if the intense female friendships (and female society) portrayed in those classic girls' school stories was helpful to women who either as children or after maturing realized that the standard life model didn't fit them. Did those depictions of all kinds of female-female relationships help create a space, in women's minds, for their own lives and desires to take shape? Those stories have been out of vogue for fifty years now.

This isn't well put, but I'm distracted and just wanted to get the idea out. If there's a book or study about this I would not be surprised and I would like to get the reference.

[owlectomy]

The "bosom friend"-ship of Anne and Diana in Anne of Green Gables actually was really important for me in thinking through, "Am I gay, or is it normal to want to have really close friendships with other girls, or is it both A and B, or...?"

[I realize the problematic-ness of "normal" in this context. In my fourteen-year-old head these two things were quite opposed.]

[em_h]

I think things are better than they used to be, but I remember struggling to find female characters I could identify with -- girls who were the main characters in stories that weren't romances, girls who were independent and *stayed* independent, who didn't cry much or at all, who took risks and succeeded; but most of all, I desperately wanted stories about girls who were unapologetically *smart*. Girls who were allowed to excel all the other characters in math or creativity or strategy. Even when I found one, what tended to happen is that eventually we'd get to a future where she got married and had a million babies and this was supposed to be the best use of her talents (Meg Murray, I'm lookin' at you ...)

Also -- young people who had the same complex anxieties and angers I did, who didn't fit in socially and weren't compelled by the narrative to change. And young people who came from the kind of slightly marginal family that I did, kids whose parents were sort of hippies and sort of intellectuals, engaged in politics, aware that society includes violence and injustice, maybe kids who got picked on at school because their families were different, and where, again, the conclusion didn't push everyone into normative positions at the end.

Girl stories that just didn't have romance in them, I would settle for. I just wanted a girl who didn't have to have a boy in the end ...

Harriet the Spy was maybe the one book I could read and see MY LIFE, in a way that made total sense (despite some huge class and context differences). To some extent also some of Paula Danziger's books. And it doesn't surprise me that the books that seemed to capture my world were written by lesbians. In fact I was so happy when I learned that Louise Fitzhugh was a lesbian, because to me that said that, even if the books had continued far into the future of the characters, Harriet would never have betrayed me, would never have married Sport and given up writing in order to have a pile of babies.

[em_h]

Oh, and Edward Eager, though not a particularly great writer, was another one I loved because his families were just that bit unconventional, there were single mothers, there were fathers who wrote musical theatre, adult men who were gentle and odd, and his girls had range -- there were bossy strong girls, and shy girls with iron wills, and smart girls, and girls who named their cats after suffragettes. And when we see some of his girls grown up, they are *not all married*, and even those who are seem to be living lives that don't revolve around their kids entirely.

[tigerflower]

I still have never read a book with a heroine/protag with whom I could identify in more than a very vague or one-note way. In YA they honestly didn't exist at all, when I was in YA age range.

[rachelmanija]

Want to talk a but about why?

[ironed_orchid]

This is a great question.

I think at that point I mostly read for escapism, and I can't remember finding any books which I clung to because I identified with the characters, or they helped me understand what it was like to be a teenager.

I did find and become attached to George Orwell, and Virginia Woolf, when I was in year 9 (13-14).

Orwell because he showed, particularly in 1984, but also in other writings, what it's like to be powerless, and how even the freedom inside your head is at risk, and at 14 which was the worst year of being bullied at high school, that was an important message.

And Woolf, I think, because she showed how the world inside your head can be bigger and richer than we might guess (I read The Waves first, which has multiple streams of consciousness).

So as a teenager who read a lot and imagined a lot, who was just starting to make friends with similar people and carve out a safe hold in a school that was threatening, both those writers became beacons, and I read everything the school library and the local library had by them.

[ursula]

A while ago I did a "fifteen fictional characters who've stuck with you" meme:

http://ursula.dreamwidth.org/139630.html

There's a pretty clear split in my list between female characters whom I identified with because they were imaginative & lonely & ambitious, and male characters whom I identified with because they were spacey mathematicians. (There are also older siblings of both sexes. I am susceptible to older-sibling-angst in fiction.)

[ursula]

Also, other people's comments on this thread make me happy I read Melissa Scott's Burning Bright when I was in eighth or ninth grade, not long after it came out. Quinn Lioe is a spaceship pilot and a talented game master! The plot is about her career choices! She meets a woman she's attracted to, they go on a date and talk about having safe sex, then they have sex. Then Quinn decides to stay on Burning Bright for a while, and maybe they get more serious.

[rhivolution]

With regards to being white and from an anglophone culture, and trying to get past a rather strict-but-not-fundamentalist Christian upbringing...yes, those I found.

But at the time, not so much with regards to OCD or bisexuality or Gender Trouble, all of which have improved in YA literature a little bit but don't quite meet my standards as of yet. I IDed far more with outsiders as a rule.

[dorothean]

I am white and otherwise very privileged, and although I am female it was very easy for me to identify with male protagonists and the assumed male reader in many books as a teenager. (Then I became a feminist and all of that became so much more annoying! Oh well.)

I am bisexual, but almost all of my romantic and sexual experiences have been heterosexual. I didn't even become aware of any attraction to other women until my late teens. I continually wonder whether reading about lesbian relationships as much as I read about heterosexual relationships all my life would have helped me feel comfortable enough with my queer leanings enough to act on them. I can't think of a single same-sex relationship in any book I read before college, although there must be one somewhere.

[holyschist]

I wanted then what I want now: stories about queer people Doing Things besides Being Queer (and Angsty) or Coming Out. Most especially, I wanted queer SFF that was just like straight SFF--main plot action/thinky stuff/whatever, subplot romance.

There's a little more of that now in YA than there was when I was a teenager, but as you mentioned recently, one can almost name them all (and personally, I'm not incredibly impressed by most of them). I'm still largely discouraged by most of the adult queer SFF I've read.

Although when it comes to YA, more queer people, period, would be good, especially as protagonists. And while I'm not trans, I'd love to see more trans characters written by someone who has at minimum talked to actual trans people and done some research.

Also, non-evil atheists who don't find their non-faith shaken--those would be nice. I hardly ever come across explicitly atheist/agnostic characters in fiction, especially YA. This didn't bother me as a teenager, when my agnosticism was more "eh" and I briefly tried to be Catholic, but now I find myself getting a bit wistful about it, to the point where I was really excited the protagonist of Guardian of the Dead was atheist/agnostic, right until she started thinking that maybe she shouldn't be, because magic, and I was so disappointed.

And female characters who are neither complete tomboys nor completely traditionally feminine--ones who are somewhere in between.

Something I found plenty of in the classic lit I read as a kid but hardly see in YA now: intense, important female friendships that don't drop to the background or become strained because some boy showed up.

Otherwise--I'm white, and generally didn't feel I had too many representation problems, because privilege. Most of the things I overidentify on are more nebulous than identity categories and hard for me to even articulate.

ETA: Also, more so now than when I was a teenager--male/female romantic relationships that look remotely like something I understand. You'd think, with all that's out there, there'd be more of that, but apparently not, although I worry about this less than queer representation, for obvious reasons. There are other sexual minority things I'd like to see positive representation of outside of actual pornographic literature (much of which is so firmly in fantasy it doesn't even make me feel positively represented), but I don't talk about those in public entries.

[rachelmanija]

I would like to see almost any sort of relationship negotiation beyond extremely basic things like, "Let's go steady" and "Stop being overprotective." It wouldn't have to be sexual, although actually, I think teenagers are probably the people who most need to hear that it's okay to say things like, "I'll do this but not that."

But in real life, people have all sorts of romantic relationships that don't fit the "instantly monogamous from the first date, one man-one woman" mold, but that's all you usually see, except for the occasional addition of cheating and angst.

I know people in poly relationships, dating without going steady, married and monogamous but not living together, married in an open relationship, friends with benefits, married for convenience but not in a sexual relationship, open to sex but not relationships, etc. But in YA, even the pretty common phenomenon of dating more than one person without being in any sort of formal poly relationship is nearly unheard of.

[starlurker]

I've yet to read a book with a character like me, which sounds like such a special snowflake statement, doesn't it? But this was something that was true way back when I was a child -- I knew that I wouldn't be able to find books with a person like me in it, so I made my peace with it a long time ago. Coming from a predominantly Catholic country made it very difficult to get any material that dealt with LGBT issues or questioning God's existence. When I came to Canada, it became a little easier to find books that dealt with LGBT and religious issues, but it became difficult to find books about being Asian instead. Most of the time, I just take particular points that books do well and mash them in my head like a Franken-novel.

[rachelmanija]

No, it doesn't sound special snowflake at all. I think it's an expression of an actual problem.

[thistleingrey]

Sexual orientation and gender, yes, because I'm basically het and cis. Not otherwise. No one in a book was called a "Communazi" in middle school, frex (someone's sixth-grade-witty coinage to reflect the German and at-the-time-behind-the-Iron-Curtain parts of my ethnic heritage).

[thefourthvine]

Characters like me? Ha ha ha ha ha. I mean, it did not help that I focused mostly on novels written in Britain many decades before I was born, but part of the reason I did that is that I actually felt I had more in common with those kids than the kids in the modern day YA and kids' books. Or, no. I guess it was more that it felt okay that I didn't have much in common with them. I wasn't supposed to. I was supposed to have things in common with the people in modern day US books, and those kids were even more alien to me than, say, the E. Nesbitt characters.

I mean, I wasn't actually expecting to see a kid like me in books. Part of my experience of growing up was learning that no one was like me, that I could never assume my thoughts or experience applied to or even would be understood by anyone else. Why would I be in books, when I wasn't, apparently, supposed to be in the real world, either? I still don't expect to find me in books. But I couldn't even find the narrative I wanted.

I knew, by the time I was seven or eight, that something was truly wrong with me, that I was broken and I could not be fixed. So while I read and loved the narratives in which kids found something magical and it changed their lives, or learned they had special abilities and it changed their lives, or discovered they had been chosen to be ruler of the whatever (and that changed their lives), what I desperately wanted was to read about someone, anyone, who didn't get the magic item, the kingdom, the sword, the telepathy, and who managed to do great things anyway. I wanted to read about the person who had to work within the context of extreme limitations imposed by society, not the ordinary person who got lifted, by some narrative advice, beyond those limitations. Because I knew the magic was never coming to fix me, and I knew that I was never going to beyond society, or able to change society to fit me. I wanted to read about someone who lived in a situation that didn't fit her, and couldn't change it, and couldn't change herself, but things ended up fine anyway.

That is, as it happens, exactly how my life ended up working out. I was right - the magic didn't come. I didn't get fixed. But I learned to live within society, and deal with my limitations, and I got exactly the life I wanted to have. In retrospect, it's amusing to me that my life ended up containing more wish fulfillment than fiction did for me.

[rachelmanija]

Thank you. That's a very moving story.

[rilina]

Like thistleingrey above, only really in sexual orientation and gender, since I'm likewise straight and cis. And for much of my childhood, I was not really aware/conscious of alternatives to that. I guess also to some extent religion; there are plenty of Christian people in fiction, but I can't think of any characters in children's fiction whose experience of that faith resembles mine.

Where I really tended to identify with characters was in outlook/personality. I identified a lot with characters who lived a lot in their heads, who were a bit socially isolated, who were school smart and not always socially happy because of that. Also things like birth order: I was very much conscious of being a younger sister of an idealized sibling, so I felt a lot like Turtle in The Westing Game or Laura in the early Little House books.

I should probably also note that I read fairly little YA fiction as an actual teen, partly by choice and partly by circumstance. Instead, I was a reader who read a lot of what would be considered middle-grade fiction at a fairly early age, and then jumped into adult fiction (especially mysteries) by the time I was in middle school. I mostly rediscovered YA after college. (This is amusing, when you consider my current profession.) But also worth noting: I was a teenager when I moved to Korea and, for the first time, was surrounded by people who were really like me in cultural background and life experiences (being TCK, Korean-American, etc.) in large numbers. They may have, for the most part, shared very few of my other intellectual interests, but it was still a life-changing thing for me to be part of the majority on those axes for the first time in my life. So I think I may have needed that mirror less in fiction at that particular time because I was, for once, getting so much of it in real life.

[bravecows]

I can't think of a single English-language book I read as a child or teenager that showed me anything but a world that was so different from my everyday life that it might as well have been set on a different planet and been about aliens (even if it was only set in England about middle-class white kids). That was part of the appeal, but while I didn't explicitly think "I wish there were stories about people like me" when I was a kid, I think I felt the lack of them.

One funny thing I used to do as a kid was grab an Enid Blyton book and essentially copy it out but put new characters in and give them different dialogue. I can't recall if the new characters were ever non-white -- probably not, but I used to struggle with my Mary Sue fantasies (you know, the ones you tell yourself before you go to bed, and while you are waiting for the bus) because it wasn't "realistic" to put in a Chinese person. And I used to be both delighted and irritated whenever Malaysia was mentioned in a slash fic! (There was a SV story where Superman has to help out with a landslide in Malaysia, and an Angel one where a white American OFC is named "Malaysia" because it's the prettiest word her dad ever heard ... that one annoyed me because they shortened it to "Melly", which is a hilariously inaccurate way to pronounce the first syllable.)

My childhood reading was really bad for me. It's not that I think white people stories are inherently bad; it's just that I needed a more varied diet.

[shewhohashope]

I always get really angry whenever my nationality is brought up in fiction, because it's invariably something horrendously stupid. But I didn't care about the lack of realism of my Mary Sue fantasies, I'd just tweak the fictional universe until it fit.

[ambyr]

And while it didn't have a serious negative impact on my life that most books I read with Jewish characters were about the Holocaust or other Very Serious Jewish Issues, to this day I erupt in squeals of joy when I encounter a non-stereotyped Jewish character in a non-issue book.

As a child (& granddaughter of survivors) I was intensely interested in Holocaust books. Grabbed as many as possible, rushed through them. And then one day I snapped and said, "No more." It wasn't that I couldn't find non-Issue books; it was that, reading the Issue books, I couldn't find my family's story. Because book after book after book was about Jews in the Holocaust, yes, but mostly about the Good Gentiles that rescued them, or about their tragic death with the subtext that modern (gentile) readers could Learn Important Lessons from it. I could not find books about Jews rescuing themselves, about Jews being brave, about Jews dealing with being survivors.

The only book that told the story I needed to read was Maus, which I encountered when I was 12 and read over and over again. I didn't find myself there, but I sure found my parents and grandparents. It was essential to helping me understand them.

[ambyr]

Oh, and on a completely different level, I remember The Court of the Stone Children as being very important to me because it was set in my local San Francisco, and recognizably San Francisco at that. Before that point I just assumed that all books set in cities had to be set in that mystical place known as New York, because, well, they were.

[zvi]

In the period of my life when I was reading YA, I was in lower elementary school in upstate NY. The only middle class, suburban black kids in YA I came across was Jessie in The Babysitters' Club books.

There were YA books with black people in them, but they always seemed to involve the past, either slavery or the Civil Rights error, or the ghetto, neither of which I could relate to.

I mostly related to Trixie Belden, who was also upstate, and had a very intense relationship with her best friend Honey. I hadn't quite figured out the lesbian thing yet, but, by the time I was ready for that, I was ready for the tragical, magical tale of Vanyel Ashkevron.

[mommy]

I found this post via my Network page.

Did I see myself in books I read as a teen? Sort of. I'm a white female from the US, and white + US are heavily represented in YA fiction. If I dig a little, I could also find female. Things got more difficult once I spread away from those three things.

I grew up in an area with large Native American and Latin@ populations, to the extent that white people were the minority. Native Americans were always severely stereotyped in anything I found them in, and it was all but impossible to find Latin@ characters at all. I could find my own racial characteristics, sure, but I couldn't find my next door neighbor's. Looking back, it's not surprising that few of my classmates enjoyed reading when their existence wasn't even being acknowledged.

Non-Christian was another characteristic I couldn't find. The default assumption in most YA fiction I read was that most people believed in Jesus, and that anyone who didn't required special exposition to show they were Just Like Everyone Else^TM, assuming non-Christians existed at all.

I occasionally found books about what it's like to grow up in poverty. Most of these books read like cookie-cutout stereotypes that happened to exist in a written form. Very few were believable.

And then there's the sexuality issue. I could occasionally find a few After School Special-esque "I'm gay!" books in the YA section if I searched really hard. I have yet to find a single asexual character, protagonist or otherwise. This wasn't a big deal to me when I was a teen since I assumed I was just a late bloomer, but it stands out now. Of course, it's difficult to find examples of ace characters in any genre. Finding ace characters who aren't villains, aliens, or otherwise "inhuman" is nearly impossible.

[rachelmanija]

I have come across ONE novel with a major, sympathetic asexual character who is explicitly identified as such: Guardian of the Dead

[karathephantom]

Not really. No lesbians in the books I read, and certainly no butch lesbians. There were a few "tomboy" characters in certain series, and I always appreciated those. I was bookish, so I also liked stories with bookish girls in them.

I hated stories about academic "prodigies" because they made it seem like your life was full of adventure and mystery if you were very smart at a young age, and I knew that wasn't the case. So that's a bit of "characters-like-me" done badly that I remember clearly.

[sub_divided]

Actually, yes. I felt like I saw myself in a lot of the books I read as a child. Probably this was because my grandmother was a children's librarian and she was always sending us books she thought we'd like.

I identified mostly as a smart girl with liberal parents who'd negotiate with you, who lived in a lower socioeconomic class neighborhood with kids who didn't understand that parenting style. I loved this book called The Treasures of Witch Hat Mountain, about a girl whose father was a university professor at a small liberal arts school, but they live in the mountain backcountry. I also liked The Missing Gator of Gumbo Limbo, an eco-mystery with a girl protagonist, and the Babysitter's Club mystery novels. I identified with Claudia because she was spacey (possibly ADD) but from an intellectual family; and I liked Dawn because she was a hippie with hippie parents, who was into mystery stuff. I always thought it was deeply unfair that Dawn and Claudia weren't best friends, especially because I couldn't stand Mary Ann (Stacey was okay, apart from being boy-crazy).

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was a nearly perfect book - I even looked like the girl who played Claudia in the movie. Also, I didn't read this as a child, but Katy in What Katy Did is a lot like me. I was always doing rash stuff like those two did.

There was a particular genre of girls-with-no-siblings-or-younger-siblings-who-are-left-on-their-own-over-summer-break-and-discover-magical-things that I was really into. I also read a lot of Asian-American YA books, because I identified really strongly with being from another culture where academic success is valued.

Some other books... Sylvia Engdahl's Enchantress Amoung the Stars
has a girl playing anthropologist among the natives of a primitive world. And she has telepathy, too!! I liked Irene from Piers Anthony's Xanth series. More ADD in that book. Nita from Diana Duane's So You Want to Be a Wizard series was bookish and into language like me, though I identified more with computer genius and promising but imperious young talent Darine (who is gay! we're into the middle school level includes-some-sex books here). Vivian Vande Velde always had girls in romances with inhuman things, which I identified with since I wasn't into normal roman. Tanya Huff, ditto, also Mercedes Lackey had that Tarma and Kethry series (the Oath books), wherein I was strongly identified with Kethry. Of course, she and Tarma should have gotten together!

By the time I was really seriously ready to read about same-sex stuff, we had a personal computer at our house, and I read Ranma 1/2 fanfiction.

Ways I wasn't able to see myself in books in the next comment.

[rachelmanija]

What? Dairine is gay? Or was that just your interpretation? I don't recall anything of the sort, but I haven't kept up with the entire series.

[oyceter]

I think when I was growing up, I could identify characters I wanted to be like, but I don't really remember ever being like "That's ME!" A lot of it may be because I read a lot of sf/f YA, but I think a lot of it was also because I moved to Taiwan when I was 8, so the bulk of my reading took place there. So even if the book ostensibly wasn't other-world fantasy, they felt like fantasy to me... OMG the world of Babysitter's Club and US high schools and proms and whatnot were so foreign. I wonder if that's why I liked the sf/f stuff... it was foreign, but at least it was supposed to be?

I'm hetero and cis, so I never had problems there. I'm not sure if I had a problem identifying with male characters, but I've always very heavily identified as female, and would basically flesh out any of the women or girls in the books I read. I think I also tended to read things with female protagonists because of this.

I used to be a huge Orson Scott Card fan, I think because in one of the forwards to his books, he writes about non-USians in space, which really resonated with me. I loved finding Asian cultures in books and read the Daughter of the Empire series a ton, and adored finding Chinese people in space in OSC's Xenocide. I mean, I find them really problematic now, but they really highlighted the complete lack of Asian characters for me when I was a kid.

I also used to get really upset with the more "real life" stories featuring Asian-Am kids, largely because the USian bit was so foreign to me and so much of what they were going through was so different from what I went through as a 2nd gen kid who moved back to Taiwan.

[cpolk]

No.

and when you consider that I was a *voracious* reader, sometimes reading two books a day, that's pretty sad. I lived in a world that had no black people who weren't related to me in it, and they didn't exist on paper, either.

Part of this was aversion, because when I was about eight, I got handed a copy of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, and I threw the book across the room and cried and screamed because it told me that what happened to me the week before is *always* what happens to eight year old black girls. I couldn't tell anyone why I was so upset. But I never touched a book with a black girl as the main character until I was forcibly assigned one in high school. I don't really remember much about it other than half her family was addicted to heroin and they lived a miserable crumbling life in some concrete hell that might have been new york. I refused to do a book report on it, I remember that much.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I've gone on about this in your journal before: I read a LOT of fiction that didn't match my lived experience, and, more often than not, it caused me to view my own experience as lacking or defective. Not just that I was, as a Jewish child, CLEARLY missing out on the good shit at Christmas; I was also missing out on the vast amounts of snow that Laura Ingalls lived through, and the town parades in the Betsy books, and these fascinating objects called "electric torches" which I assumed must have something like FLAMES about them before I learned that they were just a different term for ordinary flashlights.

Characters like Alexander, of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day fame, and later Anastasia Krupnik, were very exciting to me, because they clearly lived in the same world that I did. I was a little envious of Anastasia's tower room, but it was comforting to think that I could bike around Arlington and maybe spot the house.

And yes, omg, Jewish characters who existed OUTSIDE the Holocaust? Enormous squee.

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

I loved Anastasia Krupnik SO MUCH. I too was envious of her tower room, but also of the fact that her dad was a professor.

[rose-lemberg.livejournal.com]

When you were a child and teenager, or now, if you're currently a teenager, did you see characters like yourself in the books you read?
Umm, growing up in the Soviet Union, let's see... Plenty of books featured strong female characters. No books featured Jewish protagonists of any kind; that was taboo. As for gender/sexuality, queerness of any kind was even more taboo than Jewishness. Not before I read Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness (at 14) did I realize that it was even possible to write about these things. I was a closet queer since childhood until, well, last year. In many ways, ULG's work saved my life.

Did it matter to you when you did, or if you didn't?
Yes and yes. I used to be, for a very very long time, full of shame and confusion about my gender/sexuality, and about my nomadic identity, though not about my Jewishness. What books and movies did not supply was filled up by amazing family stories about the adventures of our family members, all very openly and very in-your-face Jewish (a hard thing to do in the Soviet Union). I credit my great-grandmother Roza, whom I've never met, for pulling me through a great many tough spots.

I feel very passionately about diversity and representation in genre, be it YA fiction, non-YA fiction, or poetry.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Rose. I do too.

[naomikritzer]

For me, it was Jewish characters that I looked for, mostly unsuccessfully. Especially female Jewish characters. It bothered me intensely that in most of the books I picked up, everyone in the entire world apparently celebrated Christmas. I was well aware that I was a minority but I was not a minority of one.

There were plenty of dismal Holocaust books. And there was the All of a Kind Family series, which I adored. And there was Judy Bloom, who was pretty close to the ONLY author interested in providing me with a Jewish character or two in a book that was not About Jewishness.

There is a random bit in Mike Ford's "The Final Reflection" in which a character is revealed to be Jewish (and it turns out Spock knows that the proper response to "Shalom aleichem" is "Aleichem shalom") and this thrilled me. I was well into high school by the time I picked that up.

(And then as an adult I picked up the Mary Russell series by Laurie King. Mary Russell is Jewish. I love those novels. Well, I love at least half of those novels; some of them are terrible. But I enjoy the series.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

The All of a Kind books were great. I loved all the little details and food descriptions (the ritualistic cracker-sharing!)