by Dhanika Pineda, AsAmNews Contributor
This week (Oct. 1-7) is Banned Books week, an event first established in 1982 to champion the freedom to read and analyze historical, and contemporary, attempts at censorship. It’s an opportunity to celebrate and elevate Asian American and Pacific Island literature.
Censorship of literature in America has long targeted books and authors expressing ideas that stray from the norm of a middle-class, white, straight America. Book bans often target stories that reflect the experiences of people of color, including the AAPI community, with 30% of banned books in 2023 carrying themes of race, racism, or featuring people of color, according to a report by PEN America.
Anti-censorship organizations such as PEN America and the American Library Association publish lists of the most challenged books in any given year. Books by and for the AAPI community often grace these charts. One Filipino-American author even tied for first place in PEN’s April 2023 Index of School Book Bans. Here is a list of banned AAPI titles to radicalize your reading:
Flamer, by Mike Curato
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This graphic novel about a 14-year-old Filipino boy unraveling the layers of his sexuality at summer camp was first challenged in September 2022 following concerns voiced by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the book’s sexual explicitness. The book has gained multiple recognitions, including the Lambda Literary Award, for its portrayal of suicidal ideation especially as the high risk exists within the LGBTQ+ community. Flamer tied for first place in PEN’s 2023 index of school book bans, and ranked as the top fourth most challenged book of 2022 in the ALA’s list.
“It wasn’t shocking to me that there is hate towards a book like this because I have experienced that my whole life, so I know it’s out there. I think what was shocking to me is that people care more about banning the book than trying to protect children’s physical lives in this day and age of mass shootings, for example,” Curato told PEN America, “The shocking thing for me is that they’re basically telling queer youth, we don’t care about you, we don’t care if you hate yourself, and we’re just fine if you decide to end things. Because we’re more concerned about shaming you about your sexuality, shaming you about masturbation.”
Sold, by Patricia McCormick
Following 13-year-old Lakshmi living in poverty in the Nepalese mountains, Sold is a heart-wrenching account of sexual slavery as Laskshmi is sold as a slave in India. The novel has been challenged in many school districts for containing sexual content. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and has earned other distinctions including the Gustav-Heinemann Peace Prize.
“It’s so important for kids to see themselves in the books they read. When kids have these experiences like sexual assault, the book gives them a way to talk about it — and then their friends and teachers can help. I find it hard to understand why books with sexual content are so threatening. I was always aware that I was writing for other people’s children, but after all, I too am a mom of now-adult children myself. But a story about the rape of a child, when they call that pornography, it’s wrong. That’s rape. They’re leaving young people defenseless in a way to understand some of the darker parts of the world.” McCormick told Yahoo News.
Hollow Fires, by Samira Ahmed
This novel follows Safiyah Mirza, a 17-year-old Indian American student journalist investigating the death of Jawad Ali, a young son of Iraqi refugees who attended public school in Chicago where Safiyah is wrapping up her final year of high school.
The book directly addresses white supremacy, and Ahmed even goes to the length of creating found documents written from a white supremacist perspective to illustrate the issues her book counters. Several school districts challenged the book’s content, including the Brandywine Community School District in Niles, Michigan where the circulation of 193 diverse books, donated to the schools by a grant they applied for, has been halted as of October 2023.
“When districts and adults try to ban diverse books or books from authors with diverse backgrounds, they are causing so much harm and damage. Deeply, to the kids whose identities are essentially being banned, when they’re being told, ‘Well, you’re erased. You don’t have a right to exist,’” Ahmed told We Need Diverse Books when asked about the possibility of her novel being banned before it was first published.
“But they’re also damaging the lives of every single kid in that school because all kids should have a right to access those stories. I’ve seen in my own experience and in talking to so many teachers how powerful it is for people who aren’t from your exact background to read those stories too.”
They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei, illustrated by Harmony Becker
This graphic memoir illustrates Takei’s experiences of growing up in an internment camp as a Japanese American during World War II. Takei, known for his acting roles as Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek and the voice of the First Ancestor in Disney’s 1998 Mulan, collaborated with Japanese American illustrator Harmony Becker to chronicle the racism, xenophobia, and other hard truths Takei was forced to live with alongside his family and many other Japanese Americans under the barbed wire of an internment camp. The book was banned in many school districts, including in Pennsylvania, along with other anti-racism resources.
“How could anyone, let alone educators, try to hide the truth from children so blatantly? How could they simply invalidate my own life experiences, simply because they were afraid of how it might make White students feel?” Takei wrote for The Big Picture Substack, “As a child, I was tough enough to endure years behind a barbed wire fence because of my race. Surely it’s not too much to ask other students simply to learn about that dark chapter of history?”
Front Desk, by Kelly Yang
The first book of Yang’s three-novel series follows 11 year-old Mia Tang, whose family has just immigrated to the U.S. from China and now runs a motel near Disneyland where Mia works the front desk. Based on her own experience as a Chinese immigrant, Yang explores themes of racism, the exploitation of immigrants, xenophobia, and more. The book was banned in school districts in New York during Banned Books week in 2021 following concerns from parents that the novel is connected to critical race theory and “divisive and controversial.”
“I think that the parents are uncomfortable with a book about a young Chinese immigrant, and they’re using a lot of different words to try to ban it … because it doesn’t fit into their very specific view of what this country is like for everyone,” Yang said to Yahoo Life. “This country is made of all sorts of different people, and you go to school to learn how to deal with the world and interact with people from all walks of life, different ethnicities … so I always think it’s great when kids can read a book about someone whose life is a little bit different and learn compassion and understanding.”
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