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Despite her enduring popularity, scholarship on Beverly Cleary's books mostly focuses on elementary education and literacy.1 Cleary's characters and the socioeconomic setting of her books, particularly the Ramona series and Dear Mr. Henshaw, have contributed to the formation of countless young Americans not only in terms of reading but also in terms of resilience and sensitivity to social, educational, and familial pressures of various kinds. In this essay I look at a small but neglected aspect of Cleary's fictional world, her representation of Chinese immigrants, and the changes in American society that undergird the different depictions in Emily's Runaway Imagination and Fifteen. Although the Chinese immigrants are not the main characters of these books, a historically contextualized reading of their portrayal shows changes in how Americanness was defined and in how Chinese immigrants fashioned themselves to shed themselves of the alienness that previously prohibited them from citizenship and other rights in the United States.
Beverly Cleary's popularity stems in large part from her ordinary, middleclass characters, including parents who struggle in their jobs and children who sometimes misbehave. A frequently repeated story about Cleary is that, while working as a children's librarian in Yakima, Washington, she was inspired by "nonreading boys . . . who wanted books about 'kids like us'" (Cleary, My Own Two Feet 330). Cleary's oeuvre is, if not beloved or fondly remembered, respected across generations, and rightly credited for revolutionizing American children's literature with respect to norms of class, gender, and decorum. Like many of my coevals, I identified with Cleary's characters' frustrations with themselves and their families, their desire for approval from adults, and the awkwardness and reward of friendships in American schools, but the estranging depiction of Chinese immigrants in Fifteen and Emily's Runaway Imagination stayed with me in more ambiguous ways that I have only been able to process through research. Cleary's respective portrayals of Chinese immigrants and Chinese culture in rural Oregon and San Francisco are focalized through the anxiety of white girls. Their anxiety exacerbates and is exacerbated by harmful (and unfortunately not entirely obsolete) stereotypes, such as Chinese predilections for kidnapping, eating strange things, speaking English with easy mocked accents and errors, particularly confusion of liquid consonants. These anxieties and stereotypes...