The Myopic American

Illustration by Dave Cutler

Consider for a moment the Mildred Batchelder Award, which is given to an American publisher for translating and publishing an outstanding children's book originally published in a foreign language. In recent years, the Batchelder committee has had a hard time finding enough books to evaluate.

Why is this?

The sad fact is that very few publishers are commissioning translations because they tend to be expensive, time-consuming, and unsuccessful in the marketplace. I attribute it to an insular mind-set visible everywhere in our American culture, but nowhere more detrimentally than in our attitude toward other cultures. It has been pointed out repeatedly in recent months that the United States is an island bordered by two oceans and two friendly neighbors. Our shores are so comfortable, so familiar, that a majority of Americans have never been out of the country and probably won't ever venture beyond our borders. In fact, as recently as a few years ago more than 50 percent of the members of Congress—the House of Representatives and the Senate—didn't even have passports.

Yet people around the world today feel strongly about America. Not long ago, a front-page headline in the New York Times read "Bush-Appointed Panel Finds US Image Abroad Is in Peril." I wonder why. Nowadays, if you ask Americans how they feel about other cultures, you pretty much get one of two responses: either people like those countries that support us in Iraq (the "They're with us or they're against us" response) or there's an anti-war response, decrying the alienating effects of our unilateral, preemptive actions. However, if you step away from current events, Americans don't seem to be very interested at all in other countries and cultures, except, perhaps, as vacation places or for the cuisine they offer. On the whole, to borrow a phrase from our illustrious Attorney General John Ashcroft, "We just don't care."

I find this highly ironic because in the last generation, the most significant development in American education has been "multiculturalism." The volume of ink shed, trees sacrificed, and slogans splashed constitutes a veritable tsunami of verbiage on this subject.

The definition offered by the National Association of Multicultural Education states that "Multicultural education is a philosophical concept built on the ideals of freedom, justice, equality, equity, and human dignity…. It affirms our need to prepare students for their responsibilities in an interdependent world…. It helps students develop a positive self-concept by providing knowledge about the histories, cultures, and contributions of diverse groups."

Right. This all sounds good and the movement has gone a long way toward raising our consciousness, at least with respect to the diversity within our culture.

Publishers love "multicultural education" and would be loath to see it wane. Every major publisher has a list of multicultural books, if not an imprint dedicated to them. However, the vast majority of these books deal with the inclusion, if not assimilation, of other cultures into our American culture. For example, two years ago I published A Step from Heaven by An Na. It is the story of a Korean girl who comes to the United States as a very young child with her mother and father. It focuses the stresses and strains of the immigrant experience on the family, which does not fare well, although the girl does. It portrays the girl's assimilation into American culture. The book was highly acclaimed and won the Michael L. Printz Award. It is now published in eight or nine languages. This year I'm publishing a book titled The Honeysuckle House by Andrea Cheng, which is about two girls; one a recent immigrant from China, the other the American–born daughter of Chinese Americans. Because the two girls look Chinese, they are constantly being thrown together. The book addresses ethnicity in a broader context, portraying again assimilation but also the tension between people who are already assimilated, who consider themselves American, and those in the process. Both of these books fit very nicely into the multicultural curriculum.

However, these books, like so many others, exemplify a dominant, cultural bias. Of course, I am not disparaging these books. I am acknowledging an orientation. There are lots of books about other cultures and about assimilation into other cultures. But for the most part, American authors don't write them and they aren't written in English. We must go to other countries, to books written in other languages to find them. At its best, multicultural education acknowledges and celebrates diversity in our culture. But it falls way short of the mark in acknowledging and celebrating the integrity of other cultures. A genuine interest in and commitment to educating children about cultural diversity must include books from other cultures. Their absence reflects a failure in vision and in the multicultural mandate.

All too often, we Americans look at other cultures as if we were looking into a mirror. We look for the familiar and when we see something we recognize, we think we've had an insight into that culture. Cultural diversity meets globalization—McDonald's arches in Tokyo. Sponge Bob dubbed in Italian. CNN on television anywhere, anytime. In fact, when we actually encounter another culture, we find it a little weird, uncomfortable, possibly dangerous.

Books originally written in another language and published in another country aren't about assimilation into American culture. They don't have anything to do with America. They present lives that are not premised on our assumptions and don't focus on our cultural concerns. Often the world they represent seems strange, sometimes it's hard to understand what's going on or what specific issues are at stake. They can be disorienting and can make many American readers uncomfortable.

To the best of my knowledge, this aversion to books in translation is not evident in other countries. Some years ago at a conference in Paris in front of an intimate gathering of 500 or so people, I was accosted by Pierre Marchand, the late, great publisher of Gallimard Jeunesse. First he described the United States as a desert wasteland littered with television sets. Then he took me personally to task for the fact that American publishers don't publish many French authors but French publishers publish lots of American authors. Before I could respond, Marchand left the room. I don't much like being bludgeoned publicly but, I have to say, he had a point. Look at any major juvenile list in Western Europe (excluding England) and you will find a substantial, vital selection of literature in translation.

All of this is, I fear, a pretty grim state-of-literature-in-translation address. It is hard for me to summon up much good news. So why do I keep publishing books in translation? I don't do it for any highfalutin altruistic reasons. And I don't do it to get rich. I do it because the books are so exciting. Have you ever been in a place for the first time? Maybe you're a little lost. You're not really in danger but you're definitely not in terra cognita. Maybe you're not quite sure what's going on but you're interested by what you see. When I'm in that situation I become very attentive to my surroundings, hyper-alert, and I proceed carefully. This heightened state of awareness is exhilarating. And gradually I get more comfortable with the situation, I find a way, points of reference that enable me to orient myself. And then, I begin to see things, even familiar things, in a new light.

This is why I keep publishing books in translation. Twenty-five years in and I still don't know how to make them more successful in this country. I can't say that I think there's much of a chance that multicultural education will embrace these books. I do believe that they offer a way of seeing that is otherwise unavailable to most of us. The only thing I know for sure is that in order to see what these books have to offer, you must leave the familiarity and comfort of our culture.