The Unrecognized Legacy: The Palimpsestuous Presence of the Little House Books in Linda Sue Park’s SeeSaw Girl

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In my other paper, “The Little House Books and Linda Sue Park’s SeeSaw Girl,” I discuss the relationship between Wilder’s books and SeeSaw Girl within the context of Asian American exclusion from the Little House world. The paper also examines SeeSaw Girl along with the American literary tradition in children’s literature as well as within the heritage of American female bildungsroman and frontier fictions.

2. Park recounted her memory of reading Carpenter’s book and its connection with her own novel: “When I was ten years old, I read in a book (Francis Carpenter’s Tales of A Korean Grandmother) how girls in aristocratic families were almost never allowed to leave their homes. This made such an impression on me that, twenty-seven years later, it became the basis of Seesaw Girl” (“Interview: Children’s Author Linda Sue Park”).

3. As indicated in ”The Little House Books and Linda Sue Park’s SeeSaw Girl,” Francis Spufford’s character delineation of Laura may apply perfectly to Jade (88). Spufford writes, “Above all, there has always been Laura’s strong response to the wide-open land that starts just outside the door of every one of her childhood homes. She is ambivalent. She looks inward to the zone of domestic security that Ma heroically creates wherever she unpacks her precious China shepherdess; she also yearns to be away, flying like a bird, moving westward like the free wind over the prairie grasses” (132).

4. Park’s historical novels set in Korea have often been criticized for cultural inaccuracy, but such “inaccuracy” rather serves to underline that Park’s work is born of her American literary imagination. Relatedly, in her Newbery acceptance speech, Park determinedly establishes herself as a writer with an American literary identity beyond her ethnicity, celebrating the “library upbringing” and “the Park Forest Public Library in Park Forest, Illinois” that her literary childhood was grounded upon (A Single Shard ii–iii). She also emphasizes that her A Single Shard is an “American novel” even though “its setting and characters may be twelfth-century Korean” (A Single Shard viii).

5. For more discussion of the consanguinity between the two, see “The Little House Books and Linda Sue Park’s SeeSaw Girl.”