Writing for Children in the Era of Chinese Exclusion: Yan Phou Lee and When I Was a Boy in China

Abstract

Yan Phou Lee’s When I Was a Boy in China (1887), the first known book by an Asian published in the United States, was not written as such, but as a series of articles for Wide Awake , a children’s magazine, while Lee, a former Chinese Educational Mission student, finished his education at Yale College. This article considers Lee’s book in light of his purposeful work to become a writer in the service of the Chinese and reads it within the context of a children’s periodical market rife with writing centred on the real and imagined lives of children in other locations – geographic, social, racial, and ethnic. Lee developed a critique of the wonder cultivated and capitalized on by Orientalist representation, and he brought this critique to bear as he wrote for children in the era of Chinese exclusion.