earticle

영어

The winner of 2002 Newbery Award and second-generation Korean American, Linda Sue Park has been acclaimed as one of today’s best multicultural children’s writers. Her Korean historical novels, including A Seasaw Girl, A Single Shard, and When My Name was Keoko, have been selected for educators’ and children’s reading lists and awarded numerous honors for their nurturing multicultural literacy. This paper, however, problematizes the prevailing tendency to celebrate an ethnic writers’ feat by focusing on his/her ethno-racial background, attempting to shed light on Park’s “American” literary and cultural identity via her complicit relationship with American children’s literature both as an avid reader and unrecognized literary descendant. Contrary to the readers’ expectation, Park’s typical suburban upbringing in Midwest America constitutes a remarkable readerly and writerly agency which is more proficient in American literary legacy and imagination versus Korean. Her deeply ingrained understanding of American children’s literature such as Laura Ingalls Wilder is embedded within her own themes of female bildungsroman. Park’s later writings with protagonists other than Asians and Asian Americans—Keeping Score, A Long Walk to Water, and collaborative works such as 39 Clues, Click, and The Chronicles of Harris Burdick—both reenact and subvert American children’s literature, further interrogating and complicating the notion of American identity, and American literature and literary heritage.