YOU Are The Main Character

 

My identity as an Asian female has made it pretty difficult for me to find books with characters I can relate to. Especially in our curriculum, I don’t believe we have read any books this year with an Asian-girl character, let alone MAIN character. Even outside of school, I haven’t read many books with characters that would look like me because there simply aren’t many. Because of this, I haven’t enjoyed the books in our curriculum as much as others with a different reader identity have, which is ok, but also a problem that needs to be continuously worked on. I don’t feel represented or understood by most of the texts we read, which is a problem Cofer directly addressed in her short story. 

She talked a lot about how she was stereotyped everyday and how that made her extremely uncomfortable. She also mentioned how it felt like she couldn’t connect with other people, even her audience, which is how I feel sometimes. In many books Asians are part of, they are the funny, foreign side characters. They aren’t taken seriously, unless the whole cast of the book is Asian and the author is also Asian. Also, the main character isn’t usually an Asian girl, unless she is someone’s love interest, which is also stereotyping. Why can’t a female Asian just be the main character? Why can’t the story revolve around her without her being in the shadows of the others? This could mislead younger Asian-girls around the world that they aren’t important enough to be the main characters, which is obviously incorrect. We need to empower these girls around the world. We need to make sure they feel represented in literature and important. We need to remind them that they are the main characters of their own stories.