International Journal of English

and Literature (IJEL)

ISSN(P): 2249-6912; ISSN(E): 2249-8028
Vol. 6, Issue 3, Jun 2016, 15-22
TJPRC Pvt. Ltd

HELEN RECORVITS'S AND GABI SWIATKOWSKA'S MY NAME IS YOON (2003): A

POSTCOLONIAL PICTURE BOOK OF ASIAN AMERICAN CHILD'S JOURNEY
INTO ASSIMILATION AND HETEROGENEITY
MARWA ESSAM ELDIN FAHMI
Assistant Professor, Department of English, College of Foreign
Languages & Translation, MISR University for Science & Technology, Giza, Egypt
ABSTRACT
The current study aims at theorizing the question of identity within the framework of postcolonial Asian
American Diaspora in Helen Reservists and Gabi Swiatkowska's picture book My Name is Yoon (2003) to highlight a
number of questions: 1) How can Asian American visuals be addressed in non-white children's literature? 2) What are
the nature of belonging and citizenship? 3) What makes Yoon, the immigrant girl, who resisted in writing her name in
English in the beginning eventually writes it in English at the end? The questions are a vehicle to investigate the
cultural and ethnic politics of Asian American literature and to explore new forms of self-identification in American
literary discourse. They also yield rich insights into how to practice multiculturalism. The selected visual narrative has
only been to the best of my knowledge- studied as a vivid example of multicultural literature in primary schools

race and ethnicity. Yet, I perceive it as a complex picture book within the domain of migration literature not only
intended for educational uses. The present study is analytical /theoretical/ aiming at establishing My Name is Yoon as
visual Multicultural literature.
KEYWORDS: Picture Book, None-White Children's Literature, Hybrid Identity, Asian American Diaspora,
Multicultural Literature

Original Article

designed for children whose age ranged from 5-9 as an activity for an English class to highlight diversity issues such as

Received: Apr 28, 2016; Accepted: May 13, 2016; Published: May 26, 2016; Paper Id.: IJELJUN201603

INTRODUCTION
Immigrant literature is geographically, socially and culturally shaped by various forms of racial
interrelation. Asian American literature exhibits a deep sense of hybridist tackling ways or concerns of how to
position immigrant's past and his current American social reality. Asian immigration to the United States has taken
place since the mid-nineteenth century and Asian immigration history. The current study aims at theorizing the
question of identity within the framework of postcolonial Asian American Diaspora in Helen Recorvits's and Gabi
Swiatkowska's picture book My Name is Yoon (2003) to highlight a number of questions: 1) how can Asian
American visuals be addressed in non-white children's literature? 2) What are the nature of belonging and
citizenship? The questions are a vehicle to investigate the cultural and ethnic politics of Asian American literature
and to explore new forms of self-identification in American literary discourse. They also yield rich insights into
how to practice multiculturalism. Elain Kim defines in her "Preface" of the pioneering work American
Literature: An Introduction to Writings and Their Social Context (1982) Asian American Literature
"as published creative writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino descent" (xi).

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Marwa Essam Eldin Fahmi

In this sense, Asian American literary criticism in a globalized context tackles the formative concept of "home" and
"self" in the immigrant's psyche.
Asian immigration to the United States has taken place since the mid-nineteenth century and Asian immigration
history since its inception till the mid-twentieth century is characterized by prejudice, violence, exclusion and deportation.
Stereotyped images define Chinese immigrants as culturally and racially Other and suppress their specific differences in
class, gender, and cultural experience. Robert Leein Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (1999)summaries
six major stereotypes against Asian Americans: "the pollutant, the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority
and the gook (Lee, 1999, p. 8) that correspond to specific stages in Asian American history. Yet, the Model Minority
myth homogenizes Asians by constructing them as the most successfully assimilated minority group. They were willing to
work hard at even the menial jobs offered to them. The Model Minority discourse seems to praise Asian Americans for
succeeding economically in the US and for becoming assimilated into the mainstream.
The selected visual narrative has only been to the best of my knowledge- studied as a vivid example of
multicultural literature in primary schools designed for children whose age ranged from 5-9 as an activity for an English
class to highlight diversity issues such as race and ethnicity. Yet, I perceive it as a complex picture book within the domain
of migration literature not only intended for educational uses. The present study is analytical/theoretical/ aiming at
establishing My Name is Yoon as visual Multicultural literature.

POSTCOLONIAL ASIAN AMERICAN DIASPORA

The contention of this study is to probe postcolonial diasporic Asian American consciousness. In An Introduction
to Postcolonial Theory (1997), Peter Childs and Patrick Williams define the Chinese community in the United States
within the perspective of postcolonial theory (10-13) to explore racial, ethnic and cultural identity that are crucial to the
analysis of minority writing. The globalized world represents "a gradual spectrum of mixed-up differences"
(Geertz, 1988: 148). This underscores key concepts such as hybridity, diaspora and multiculturalism entanglement rather
than identity, togetherness-in-difference rather than separateness. The significance of diasporic identity lies in its force as a
symbolic declaration of liberation from abject position of 'ethnic minority' in an oppressive hegemony. Diaspora, with this
rationale, provides a sense of transnational belonging and connection with dispersed others of similar historical origins:
"diasporic identifications reach beyond ethnic status within the composite, liberal state" (Clifford, 1997: 255) imparting a
"sense of being a people, with historical roots and destinies outside the time/space of the host nation" (Clifford, 1997: 255).
This highlights the premise that many Asian Americans do not see the local and the diasporic as contradictions. This
explains the hyphen less spelling of the term 'Asian American' that "affirms the indivisible integrity of the Asian American
experience [and] to minimize any negative connotation associated with bilaterality" (Feng, 32).
Diaspora is a Greek word used to describe "the sowing of seeds and then applied to Greek colonization in the
Mediterranean" (Cohen, 1997: 117-20). Stuart Hall (1994) - the proponent of Diaspora-as-diversity regards diaspora as a
coherent unit of geographically dispersed people bound by sentiment, culture and history. In Beyond the Bonders:
American Literature and Post-colonial Theory (2003), Rajini Srikanth refers historically to diaspora which is a term that
no longer applies only to the Jewish or African peoples: "Colonial dictates, labor migrations of the nineteenth and
twentieth centurys, wars, and the globalization of 'capital' have resulted in the wide dispersal of Asian such as the Indians,
Chinese or Vietnamese to various regions of the globe East Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, England, Canada and

Impact Factor (JCC): 4.4049

Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 6.1

Helen Recorvits's and Gabi Swiatkowska's My Name is Yoon (2003): A Postcolonial

Picture Book of Asian American Child's Journey into Assimilation and Heterogeneity

17

the United States" (93).

Global Diasporas signify the transnational communities whose boundaries are porous and heterogeneous. In this
sense, global diaspora is a triumph over the shackles of the national identity since it refers to a sense of belonging to more
than one identity. Seen in this way, Diasporas not only are placed in direct opposition to the nation-state, but are also
implicitly designated as key socio-cultural formations capable of overcoming the constrictions of national boundaries. This
foregrounds "the possibility of cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy"
(Bhabha, 1994: 4). Hybridity, thus, refers to "the creation of new transcultural form" (Ashcroft et al., 1998: 20). Hybridity
as Robert Young postulates in Colonial Desire (1995) is "a key term in that wherever it emerges it suggests the
impossibility of essentialism" (27). Diasporic writings address problems that arise from the transnational space created by a
fluid community that is neither at home nor outside and "such negotiation is neither assimilation nor collaboration"
(Bhabha, 1994: 58) but an "interstitial space" that refuses "the binary representation of social antagonism"
(Bhabha, 1994: 58). Finally, postcolonial exploration of the effects of diaspora and migration has contributed to map out
the fabric of multicultural societies. Stuart Hall in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (1996) states the significance
of diaspora as a determinant factor in the configuration of identity, a cultural construct which, in the context of
multicultural environments he dissociates from purity relating it instead to heterogeneity: "Diaspora identities are those
which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and differences" (402).
Postcolonial theory is polysemous since it foregrounds and problematizes the key relationship between the centre
and periphery antagonism. In other words, postcolonial theory is an effort to create a counter critical discourse that contests
hegemonic settings of modernity with other forms of enunciation to ironize and subvert unquestioned assumptions of
binary oppositions. In Location of Culture (1994), the postcolonial critic, Homi Bhabha, states that postcolonial theory is
an attempt to interrupt, to read contrapuntally and interrogatively the tragic experiences of those dispossessed of
voice and discriminated against to formulate critical revisions of empowering strategies of emancipations
(Bhabha, 1994: 246). Thus, postcolonial criticism is not a monolithic theory with a fixed set of paradigms and it is
essentially ambivalent, hybrid and disjunctive.

MY NAME IS YOON (2003): A POSTCOLONIAL PICTURE BOOK OF ASSIMILATION AND

HETEROGENEITY
What is remarkable about Helen Recorvits's and Gabi Swiatkowska's My Name is Yoon (2003) is that the narrative
is a vivid visual representation of cultural hybridity of Asian identity. Pictorialization is a genre under debate that
foregrounds the importance of visual literacy in the 21th century. The term literacy is itself under erasure since children
today experience a constant stream of ideas and information online, in print and through electronic games and mass media.
Pictorialization manifested in films, picture book and graphic novels takes the viewer away from current world to
"a level of understanding deeper and wider than the limited lives may be to a world uglier or more beautiful, more
humorous or more somber, simpler or more complex. And like the best of any art form, it forces us to confront the depths
of our secret selves" (Lukens, 212). Pictorialization seeks the strong engagement to both images and words because the
relation between the two can reinforce, alter or even undermine the apparent meaning of visual narratives. In other words,
the denotative context of the narrative text is interpreted by the connotation of the visual text. Finally, pictorialization is an
embodiment of hybrid literature that tackles the interplay of word and image and the pivotal question: how do these images
function as part of the text? This interplay is central to developing new ways of understanding how images work. This
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Marwa Essam Eldin Fahmi

interplay creates a third space that is neither purely verbal, nor purely visual, a point examined by the visual scholar W.
J. T. Mitchell in What Do Pictures Want? (2005): The space between words and images is a kind of void into which
(and from which) ideas, passions, narratives, representations emerge. It is the third space, the in-between where
contingency rules (emphasis mine, Mitchell, 2005, 47).
My Name is Yoon (2003) reflects the attempts of immigrants to form an identity based on assimilation as well as
the aspirations to achieve the "American Dream". My Name is Yoon mirrors the inner struggles of a Korean child
presenting a more romanticized reflection of the obstacles faced by immigrants in general. Yoon is a young Korean girl
who has immigrated with her family to the United States. Yoons name means Shining Wisdom, and when she writes it in
Korean, it looks happy, like dancing figures:

Figure 1
But her father tells her that she must learn to write it in English. In English, all the lines and circles stand alone,
which is just how Yoon feels in the United States. Yoon is not sure that she wants to be YOON. At her new school, she
tries out different names maybe CAT or BIRD. Maybe CUPCAKE!

Figure 2
She yearns to return to her homeland where her name, meaning Shining Wisdom, dances together as symbols
instead of the ugly circles and lines that appear in English. Yoon learns how to spell cat and substitutes CAT for her
own name. Yoons teacher encourages her to use her own name but Yoon, who is certain her teacher and classmates dislike
her, writes CAT on every line trying to conceal her inner feelings:

Figure 3
It is an encounter with a classmate on the playground that Yoon imagines she is CUPCAKE and wins the
affection of her classmates. In the end, Yoon accepts her new home and English name knowing she is still
"Shining Wisdom".
Impact Factor (JCC): 4.4049

Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 6.1

Helen Recorvits's and Gabi Swiatkowska's My Name is Yoon (2003): A Postcolonial

Picture Book of Asian American Child's Journey into Assimilation and Heterogeneity

19

Swiatkowsha creates vibrant pictures laden with surprising vistas and dreamscapes. Her paintings border on
surrealistic. They support the feeling and emotions of Yoon. Yoon's simple, first-person narrative stays true to the small
immigrant childs bewildered viewpoint, and Swiatkowskas beautiful paintings, precise and slightly surreal, capture her
sense of dislocation. The images set close-ups of the child at home and at school against traditional American landscapes
distanced through window frames. In a classroom scene many children will relate to, everything is stark, detailed, and
disconnectedthe blackboard, the teachers gestures, and one kids jeering face a perfect depiction of the childs
alienation.
By the end, when Yoon is beginning to feel at home, the teacher and children are humanized, the surreal becomes
playful and funny instead of scary, and Yoon is happy with friends in the wide, open school yard. The reader is drawn in to
feel for Yoon as her face reveals the range of feelings from sadness, confusion, irritation, playfulness, and finally pride.
Children will identify with Yoon and her feelings of insecurity and lack of acceptance:

Figure 4
This is a sensitive look at how a young girl learns to adopt her new country, accepts the changes in her life, and
thrives in her new circumstances. What makes Yoon, the immigrant girl, who resisted in writing her name in English in the
beginning eventually writes it in English at the end? Childrens written representation of their own names may serve as a
window into their developing base of emergent literacy knowledge. Across cultures, children commonly recognize their
written names at a very young age, and often begin conventional writing by writing letters in their names. Name
recognition and name writing has been shown to be a significant predictor of childrens early literacy achievement. Yoon
has a vivid and creative imagination through which she describes her loneliness and longing to return to Korea. Ultimately
it is Yoons imagination that allows her to feel accepted by her new peers and as a result begins to accept her new
language.
Immigration has been a rich foundation of mythical stories throughout mans history. Migration is always an
emblem of the migrants dreams, fears, alienation, and hope for a better future. Within this rationale, postcolonial theories
in our globalized age- can rebut anti-colonial nationalist theory and surpass colonialism. Ashcroft sustains how
hybridity and the power it releases may well be seen as the characteristic feature and contribution of post-colonial,
allowing a means of evading the replications of the binary categories of the past and developing new anti-monolithic
models of cultural exchange and growth (Italics mine, 183). Hence, postcolonial theory can be global and multicultural
beyond the center/periphery power relations. This is obviously an idealistic and celebratory view of hybrid identity.
This poses a vital question: what is hybrid identity? In a broad sense, the hybrid can mean an individual having
access to two or more ethnic identities. Historically speaking, the initial use of the term hybrid was offensive and abusive,
that is, a stigma in relation to colonial racist notions the purity of antagonistic communities (Sibley, 410) that
propagated the inferiority of mixed-breeds of white and other races and these racist communities sought protection by
maintaining territorial boundaries and frontiers. In an intricate vein, the hybrid space is defined by the prominent
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Marwa Essam Eldin Fahmi

postcolonial theorist, Homi Bhabha in his Location of Culture (1994), as the Third Space described as being productive,
interruptive, interrogative and enunciative (Bhabha, 103) to subvert dualistic vision within the realm of colonial binary
thinking. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995), Robert Young, the renowned postcolonial
critic, also holds the view that hybridity dismantles the discourse of colonial authority [losing] its univocal grip on
meaning and finds itself open to the trace of language of the other (22). In a 1990 interview by Jonathan Rutherford,
Bhabha states that the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third
emerges; rather hybridity to me is the Third Space, which enables other positions to emerge (Rutherford, 211).
The Third Space signifies the place where negotiation takes place, where identity in all its ambiguities is constructed and
reconstructed. In this context, Bhabhas rhetoric of hybridity is more sophisticated than the simple notions of
multiculturalism as tolerance and mere acceptance of the difference within the humanist viewpoint. Finally, postcolonial
exploration of the effects of diaspora and immigration has contributed to map out the fabric of multicultural societies.
Stuart Hallin Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (1996)states the significance of diaspora as a determinant factor
in the configuration of identity, a cultural construct which in the context of multicultural environments he dissociates from
purity relating it instead to heterogeneity: Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing
themselves anew, through transformation and differences (Hall, 1996: 402).

CONCLUSIONS
Postcolonial studies are preoccupied with the issues of migration, hybridity, and identity questions
(Italics mine, Ashcroft et al., 11). Hybridiy has entered many academic fields such as literature, anthropology, and
postcolonial theories to examine diverse cultural identities. As a central concept in postcolonial discourse, hybridity is
celebrated and privileged as a kind of superior cultural intelligence owing to the advantage of in-betweens, the straddling
of two cultures and the consequent ability to negotiates the difference (Hoogvelt, 158). The present study is a critique of
Asian American Diaspora. Asian American literature poses a question of profound importance to the Asians in the United
States of America: "Who are you?" The question refers to the state of being 'local', 'foreign' and 'Other'. This highlights the
web of interlocking and interrelated themes of nostalgia, belongingness, alienation and identity turmoil. Searching for
identity is the driving force for Yoon to find out who she is and which culture defines her and her journey is a signifier of
her attempts to fit in.
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Impact Factor (JCC): 4.4049

Index Copernicus Value (ICV): 6.1

Helen Recorvits's and Gabi Swiatkowska's My Name is Yoon (2003): A Postcolonial

Picture Book of Asian American Child's Journey into Assimilation and Heterogeneity

21

University Press.
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