Tongues Untied: Children’s Strategies of Classroom Survival in Darrell Lum, R. Zamora Linmark, and Monique Truong

This article focuses on four short stories written by three Asian American writers. All of them stage the social dynamics within groups of young children—fifth graders and younger—and between pupils and teachers. The setting of these stories is the classroom, the central arena for the socialization of children and the battlefield on which minority and immigrant subjectivities try to negotiate their own position in a public sphere that marginalizes them in multiple and entwined ways. The young characters in these stories exceed, resist, and deliberately play with norms and prescriptions, showing the complexity and heterogeneity of subjects who are interpellated and defined by several categories of identity (and difference), such as language, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality. This reading of these short stories attempts to highlight, on the one hand, the process of subjectification—in particular, how the young minority subject is taught to become a national subject—and, on the other hand, the strategies employed by the national authority to defend an idea of homogeneous national identity in spite of all its pluralistic claims. While facing the power of a social order that attempts to discipline, to punish, and to normalize them, the children in these short stories still manage to survive in a hostile environment, envisioning cross-gender, cross-racial, and cross-national coalitions.