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Children’s Books

For 12 Young Asian American Travelers, Turbulence Begins at the Airport

“You Are Here: Connecting Flights,” a story collection edited by Ellen Oh, contends not only with racist aggressions, but also with cultural expectations and adolescent insecurities.

A color illustration shows an Asian American boy and girl, with luggage, on an airport’s moving sidewalk, reacting to angry and disapproving glances from the grayed-out white people ahead of and behind them.
Credit...James Yang

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YOU ARE HERE: Connecting Flights, edited by Ellen Oh


Modern air travel is a perfect distillation of our ailing society, which is why airports make excellent settings for fiction. Drama loves a stressor, and flying offers plenty: the interminable waits, the casual extortion, the brazen inequality, the privacy violations, the dearth of habitable space. Coming or going, you’re bound to suffer.

The airport at the center of “You Are Here: Connecting Flights,” a collection of 12 cleverly linked stories by Asian American authors, happens to be in Chicago. But its mushrooming chaos, due to weather delays and last-minute cancellations, is a familiar joy of most major travel hubs. Here, it’s the Saturday before the Fourth of July, a summer storm has wreaked havoc on flight schedules, and many of the book’s young Asian protagonists, who all seem to be around 12, are enduring run-ins with extremely jerky strangers.

In the opening story, by Christina Soontornvat, Paul is in the security line with his parents, grandmother and 3-year-old sister, early for a 31-hour trip to see relatives in Bangkok. (“We are at the airport, the place you go to wait in line for more waiting.”) A blond woman wearing a pink sweater is in a hurry. “Just our luck that we’d get stuck behind these people,” she grumbles audibly to her son. “They slow everything down.” To Paul’s frustration, his family does end up slowing everything down: Grandma is traveling with her late husband’s ashes in a coffee can, “Big Lebowski” style, and a routine T.S.A. check prompts a tense, if brief, standoff.

Pink Lady, as Paul calls the white woman, blows a gasket, but the bigger problem is that Paul’s sister wanders off amid the confusion. The T.S.A. squabble and the search for the lost girl become reference points that help connect the disparate narratives in this fine collection, as do a couple of other incidents in later stories: A boy gets his finger stuck in a chair (in a winning story by Susan Tan written entirely in numbered lists) and a pair of dopey security guards corner a kid about his guitar case (in a story by Mike Chen). These crises all turn out to be pretty minor. But in an airport packed with skittish, irritable travelers, even the slightest jangle can quickly amplify into trouble.

The first several stories fall into a predictable rhythm. We start to anticipate the Moment: the racist aggression (micro or macro, well-intentioned or ill-willed) that will set off the principal character’s anger or despair. Often there’s more than one woven into a story: the inadvertent gaffe or borderline offense and then the flagrant foul meant to stop readers in their tracks.

“Those illegals. They bring kids who aren’t related and make them pretend to be siblings.”

“Well, their parents don’t know any better. … Cultural differences and all that.”

“I don’t know how they do things where you come from, but this is a professional establishment. We do not bring children to work with us.”

“Hopefully they go back to their own country and stay there.”

“Kung Flu.”

Lines like these land a little clumsily at first. They seem cartoonishly improbable when encountered in fiction — up until someone in real life, like, say, a United States president, utters one on national television, or a smartly dressed woman in a Manhattan park tells your toddler that she loves her “chinky eyes.”

It happens, and it wears you out. The real struggle comes later: the absurd feeling that it’s something you must have instigated, something you must get over. The characters in “You Are Here” contend persistently with this one-two punch, further confounded by cultural expectations, peer pressure and adolescent insecurities.

In a story by Meredith Ireland, Mindy, a Korean adoptee, is traveling with her two white fathers, who are taking her to Seoul so she can reconnect with her “roots.” She can’t bring herself to tell them that she doesn’t want to go, and after a xenophobic insult flies her way at the airport, she hates that she stays quiet. “Why hadn’t I been able to say something?” she asks herself. “Ugh. I am not the stand-up-to-things type. I can’t even tell my own dads how I feel.” Her dads, at least, are very vocal and want her to be, too. The parents of some of the other narrators are less supportive.

Jane’s mother, in a story by Grace Lin, snaps at her daughters to ignore provocations: “Don’t get involved in other people’s problems.” Another character, in a story by Ellen Oh, seethes when confronted with bigotry but can’t mutter a word without Mom shutting her up. “‘Soojin,’ her mother admonished. Unspoken was the demand: Don’t make a scene. Don’t bring undue attention. Don’t cause trouble.

Pushed beyond reason, the main characters have every right to make a scene. But what the authors also poignantly show is that the very cultures under attack in these stories teach their children to bear adversity in silence. To stand up for your heritage, it seems to many young Asian Americans, is to betray it.

These internal conflicts over self-expression make for far richer story prompts than the racist idiocy of villainous white people. Khoi, in a very funny piece by Minh Lê, nervously thumbs through his phrase book in preparation for his first trip to Vietnam, then falls asleep and dreams about all the ways he’ll humiliate himself if he attempts even a few words. Natalie, the Japanese protagonist of one of the book’s strongest stories (by Traci Chee), faces perhaps the thorniest dilemma: What do you do when the racist idiocy is coming from your own best friend, who is flying you on a cross-country vacation?

“You Are Here” — which also includes stories by Randy Ribay, Mike Jung, Erin Entrada Kelly and Linda Sue Park (whose imprint the book launches), and is adroitly edited by Oh — works as a linked collection because one character’s crisis becomes another’s teachable moment. As these young people observe the problems of others, they see themselves in their peers and gain the confidence to address problems of their own. To the reader’s satisfaction, many of them finally do find their voices, and while Pink Lady may not be the most receptive to their efforts, others, like Natalie’s friend, are. They remind us that a more functional, less ailing America requires not just the courage to speak but the courage to listen.


Dave Kim is an editor at the Book Review.


YOU ARE HERE: Connecting Flights | Edited by Ellen Oh | 265 pp. | Allida/HarperCollins Publishers | $18.99 | Ages 8 to 12

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: ‘Why Hadn’t I Been Able to Say Something?’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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