ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates leisure reading materials that inform American youth of ethnic Chinese wartime experience. The analysis generates an overview of the publication patterns of US juvenile fiction that has the Sino-Japanese War (SJW) as its main setting or subject, and examines how those patterns correlate with the political and cultural context of a racialized American society. An analysis of Chinese-language story books about the war cannot be isolated from the big picture of China's publishing for youth in the twentieth century, American youth literature that portrays ethnic Chinese wartime experiences is best viewed. The lack of Chinese voices during the war years can be explained by the history of Chinese American youth literature: as late comers to literature about their own cultural group, and even later to the world of youth literature, pioneer Chinese authors were not yet active in fictional writing for youth.
