Little Children's Illegitimate Children?

I'm a pop culture icon! Not really. But Entertainment Weekly Magazine mentioned how my cover design for Tom Perrotta's novel Little Children with it's green lawn background inspired copycat covers.
If it's true, I'm flattered. But the kid is not my son.
Although their mock cover for Leaves of Grass IS pretty brilliant.


Cover photograph by Wendy Idele

You can read a bit about the controversy surrounding the HC edition of Little Children with its Goldfish cracker cover that I was forced to change. Which I thought was perfect for the story.

Judging Asian Americans by Our Book Covers

I had a phone discussion with writer Neelanjana Banerjee of Hyphen Magazine about the use of stereotypical imagery on Asian American book covers. Above is the 3 page article. I wonder what she'll think about the jacket I did for THE SNAKEHEAD below?

JUDGING ASIAN AMERICANS BY OUR BOOK COVERS
Hyphen Magazine, Winter 2008 by Banerjee, Neelanjana

Do stereotypical images reflect bad marketing or stilted writing-or both?

YOU WOULD THINK that in the publishing world where Asian Americans have had significant mainstream success we wouldn't still be subjected to exotified marketing. Yet when I sort through the Hyphen book box at our office, I see an array of stereotypical Asian images: lotus blossoms, flowing saris, flawless Asian faces. I know I'm not supposed to judge, but I sometimes have a hard time getting past the cover to read what's inside.

This may sound like a terrible admission for a book editor that I judge Asian American books by their covers. But let me ask you: Is Asian American culture only about chopsticks, geishas, fans and dragons? Or are we simply being reduced to stereotypes that sell?

Perhaps the trend of "chinking up" book covers comes directly from the success of Asian American authors. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts study To Read or Not to Read showed that Americans are spending less on books than at almost any other time in the past two decades. So, since books about Asian Americans tend to do well - Amy Tan's stereotype-laden The Joy Luck Club (1989) still has millions of copies in print - publishers want to mark other books in the same way: with "authentic" cultural artifacts.

This makes me wonder if the pressure on Asian American writers to be "more Asian" hasn't grown worse lately. Judging by the endless memoirs about growing up in [insert Asian country here] that come through the Hyphen office, it seems that writers are succumbing to such pressure. Could it be that the bad book cover problem stems from (gasp!) the writing itself?

Henry Sene Yee, creative director of Picador Books, says that when it comes to book cover design, everything the designer does is coming from the book. "If you are an Asian American and you are writing about 18th century China, the writer is pigeonholing themselves in a way," Yee says. "Asian writers who are only writing about the Asian experience that limits [the designer] to work[ing] with certain images."

Yee is working on the paperback cover of Don Lee's farcical novel, Wrack and Ruin, about Lydon Song a sculptor who flees New York City to be a Brussels sprouts farmer in a coastal California town, only to have his brother try to sell the land to developers who want to build a golfcourse resort. So far, Yee has a close-up image of a Brussels sprout on a golf tee.

"His book isn't just about the Asian experience or the culture," Yee insisted, "so it was easier to come up with an idea."

Yee says the publishing industry is all about recognizable codes: "Russian constructivist font for Russian books; torn paper and beige for Westerns; italics, diamond rings and legs for women's fiction," he says. "The writer is tapping into this culture; so is the designer, and so is the reader."

But Sunyoung Lee, editor of indie Asian American publishing house Kaya Press, argues that publishing houses deserve some of the blame: "Mainstream publishers typically do a terrible job of designing book covers for Asian American authors though things seem to have improved recently from where they were in the 90s."

Lee's primary example of a poorly handled book cover is the 1995 anthology On a Bed of Rice: An Asian American Erotic Feast published by Anchor, an imprint of Doubleday. The cover features a blurry naked Asian woman on a bed, covering her private parts with a fan, with lilies in her hair and Chinese lettering printed over her body under book's English title.

But as Lee points out, it isn't just major presses making such covers. Take, for example, the Copper Canyon Press poetry book Spring Essence, published in 2000, a translation of the work of 17th century Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong. On the cover is a photograph of a naked woman holding an enormous plate over her face.

"This was particularly upsetting to me precisely because Copper Canyon is such a wonderful press, with so many amazing authors and projects on their list, including this one," Lee says. "One of the points that [translator] John Balaban makes in his intro is that there are tons of double entendres in [Ho Xuan Huong's] poetry . . . that it was far racier than you might suspect. But to try to sell a Vietnamese classical female poet a literary hero, in fact with a naked, faceless woman! It still makes my blood boil."

Lee thinks that Copper Canyon had good intentions and probably didn't think the cover would be considered offensive. "But in a way, that's precisely the problem. They don't even see what the problem might be."

Writers and readers need to take the publishing industry to task for the way it pressurizes both the content and the marketing of Asian American books. Maybe that's what it would take to shift the focus to what's most important: the writing.

Neelanjana Banerjee, Hyphen's Books Editor, is only judgmental when it comes to books, really.

Copyright Hyphen Magazine Winter 2008
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Art Director: Emily Mahon // Doubleday
Photographer: Simon Lee

about this book
A mesmerizing narrative about the rise and fall of an unlikely international crime boss

In the 1980s, a wave of Chinese from Fujian province began arriving in America. Like other immigrant groups before them, they showed up with little money but with an intense work ethic and an unshakeable belief in the promise of the United States. Many of them lived in a world outside the law, working in a shadow economy overseen by the ruthless gangs that ruled the narrow streets of New York’s Chinatown.

The figure who came to dominate this Chinese underworld was a middle-aged grandmother known as Sister Ping. Her path to the American dream began with an unusual business run out of a tiny noodle store on Hester Street. From her perch above the shop, Sister Ping ran a full-service underground bank for illegal Chinese immigrants. But her real business-a business that earned an estimated $40 million-was smuggling people.

As a “snakehead,” she built a complex—and often vicious—global conglomerate, relying heavily on familial ties, and employing one of Chinatown's most violent gangs to protect her power and profits. Like an underworld CEO, Sister Ping created an intricate smuggling network that stretched from Fujian Province to Hong Kong to Burma to Thailand to Kenya to Guatemala to Mexico. Her ingenuity and drive were awe-inspiring both to the Chinatown community—where she was revered as a homegrown Don Corleone—and to the law enforcement officials who could never quite catch her.

Indeed, Sister Ping’s empire only came to light in 1993 when the Golden Venture, a ship loaded with 300 undocumented immigrants, ran aground off a Queens beach. It took New York’s fabled “Jade Squad” and the FBI nearly ten years to untangle the criminal network and home in on its unusual mastermind.

THE SNAKEHEAD is a panoramic tale of international intrigue and a dramatic portrait of the underground economy in which America’s twelve million illegal immigrants live. Based on hundreds of interviews, Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping narrative tells the story not only of Sister Ping, but of the gangland gunslingers who worked for her, the immigration and law enforcement officials who pursued her, and the generation of penniless immigrants who risked death and braved a 17,000 mile odyssey so that they could realize their own version of the American dream. The Snakehead offers an intimate tour of life on the mean streets of Chinatown, a vivid blueprint of organized crime in an age of globalization and a masterful exploration of the ways in which illegal immigration affects us all.

WHERE THE SNAKEHEAD SLITHERED
Key locations from Patrick Radden Keefe's The Snakehead, which documents the rise and fall of Chinatown's immigrant-smuggling kingpin, mild-mannered Sister Ping, and its most vicious gangster, Ah Kay.
—New York magazine, July 26, 2009