Linda Sue Park reflects on the concept of "borders" during an authors' panel at Crossing Borders through Literature, Poetry and Personal Stories.
About the author: Linda Sue Park became a published author at age 9, when a haiku she wrote appeared in a children’s magazine. Thirty years later, she published her first novel, Seesaw Girl, set in 17th-century Korea. Her research into Korean history and culture was the basis for other acclaimed young adult novels and picture books, including The Kite Fighters; When My Name was Keoko; The Firekeeper’s Son; and A Single Shard, winner of the 2002 Newbury Medal. Her latest novel, A Long Walk to Water, is based on the true story of one of the Sudanese "Lost Boys" airlifted to the United States in the 1990s, who eventually returned to his home region in southern Sudan to establish a foundation providing deep-water wells for remote villages in dire need of clean water.
4/7/2011
I was instantly interested in what Alma Flor said about barriers versus borders, because I have the kind of mind for whom borders are extremely useful. If not, you get this amoeba-like thing, right? I want to be able to not have them be barriers.
But I think that definitions and limits can be very useful. They can be very helpful, on so many levels. In my writing, I think- when I’m writing a novel- in scenes. If I thought "novel" I would never write a single word. I’m like, I’m writing a scene today, that is what I’m doing. And that’s got a border around it. It’s got a start and a finish, right? And so for me it's not like I want to, I want to cross them, I want to use them. But I don’t want to eliminate them. And that also happens on many other levels.
The whole “melting pot” idea, for example—to me it sounds really messy, you know. I’ve seen in my own life, for example, that my parents were determined to assimilate, being again first-generation immigrants, before anybody said ‘multicultural’, before anybody said ‘bilingual’. And so, what they did was to never speak any Korean at home. So now I have no Korean, right? And so that was the good immigrant, the good assimilation. There was no border there in their attempt to become good Americans. And now I have this great loss of not being able to speak Korean, right? So I think of borders as not always something negative [but] as something useful, as something that help us define and contain, but in a good way.