Learning about my own work

Recently, this link was shared with me (thanks so much, Susan!). It's an academic article titled, Negotiating Asian American Childhood in the Twenty-First Century: Grace Lin’s Year of the Dog, Year of the Rat, and Dumpling Days that was published in The Lion and the Unicorn. I'm quite honored! I think it's the first published academic writing about my work...this is definitely a milestone!

But not only is it a milestone,  the article is so gratifying to me as an author. It  encapsulates the things I was trying to do in my books (show that "....no Asian American child is exactly the same as another.") as well as things I hadn't thought of (Pacy's view of Audrey Chang  in Dumpling Days as a foil for that Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom book).

However, it also brought up a viewpoint of my work that I had never thought about-- the "tourist-multicultural approach to ethnicity." It is true that Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is much more popular than the Year of the Dog; do readers prefer reading about an Asian of Asia vs an Asian-American?  Something I need to mull over and think about...