The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield by Minjie Chen

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield by Minjie Chen Claudia Nelson The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield, by Minjie Chen. Routledge Studies in Education and Society in Asia. Routledge, 2016. In The Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature, Minjie Chen takes on two subjects that have received less attention in the West than should be the case: the China theater of the Second World War (which here extends from 1937, when the Japanese invaded and occupied much of the country, to 1945) and Chinese youth literature. Her principal interest is in how the latter represents the former and why the representations take the particular shapes that they do, but because she is aware of how much context her English-speaking readers are likely to need to make sense of the information provided, the book's focus is by no means unitary. Chen provides a brief history of children's literature in China from its beginnings to the present; a thorough discussion of [End Page 227] lian huan hua (LHH), a form of small paperback picture story book packaging fiction and nonfiction narrative that, like British chapbooks before the eighteenth century, addresses readers of all ages; a set of oral histories collected from elderly women in Yunhe, Zhejiang Province, and dealing with their memories of Japanese germ warfare as directed against their town; and an overview of Chinese American children's literature culminating in a discussion of the thirty-one titles that she has identified as dealing with the Sino-Japanese War. She is interested in political and military history, in gender, in illustration, in book history, in questions of readership, and more. While sometimes a bit of a grab bag, the result accordingly offers readers enlightenment and information on a variety of important topics. Following a brief introduction laying out research questions and offering background on the war, the book is organized into five chapters. "Chinese Youth Literature: An Overview" discusses the literature from its roots in the work of American missionaries to the present, and argues for the importance of LHH in any investigation of Chinese children's reading. "The Sino-Japanese War as Depicted in Chinese Youth Literature: The Big Picture" explains Chen's approach to gathering sources and lays out "publication and thematic patterns" to be found in LHH; the chapter offers "a quantitative analysis of how the history of the SJW has been reflected in 360 LHH titles and twenty-two youth literature works that also exist in LHH adaptations, published in mainland China from 1937 through 2007" (74). "The Sino-Japanese War as Depicted in Chinese Youth Literature: A Thematic Analysis" looks at the portrayal in LHH of military combat, violence and atrocities, social class, and partisan membership. "Family Narrative as Information Source: A Case Study" argues for the importance of considering the transmitted memories of elders alongside print sources as an alternative, potentially less heavily censored means for children to learn about the wartime past. The final chapter, "Ethnic Chinese Wartime Experience in American Youth Literature," provides a comparative dimension to the volume by tracing the social and political pressures that have historically operated to discourage the development both of a robust Chinese-American children's literature and, more specifically, of a body of works for children and adolescents focusing on the Sino-Japanese War that would not be as "disappointingly tiny … largely outdated, out of print, and contributed by white authors" as the works that we in fact have (205). Chen, a project cataloguer for the East Asian Children's Collections at Princeton University's Cotsen Children's Library, earned her PhD [End Page 228] in Library and Information Science (her dissertation, which won an award for outstanding doctoral work from the University of Illinois, was an earlier version of the present study), and her approach to her materials is accordingly more social-scientific than literary, with much discussion of data collection, methods, and the like. Techniques of close reading are not much on display in this book, and Chen's major question about her chosen texts—namely the extent to which they are historically accurate—may...