Appropriate for Grades K-5
Have you ever felt lonely and left out at school? Have you ever been the new kid? Well, in My Name is Yoon, Yoon, the little girl, is not only dealing with feeling left out, she is having difficulty with a new language and a new country. See what happens as she spends more time in her new school and country.
A young girl, named Yoon, must learn to adjust living in an unfamiliar country surrounded by a new language and new culture than her own. Yoon struggles to accept her new "home" in America and is faced with many challenges especially in school. She must overcome the language barrier and strive to find her place in this strange and unknown place. Yoon is attached to her Korean background and battles to implement a new culture. She is hesitant to learn to write her name in English and prefers her Korean written name because it is all she knows. The story depicts her transition from moving to a foreign country and embracing a new culture and discovering that by accepting this new culture she is not replacing or forgetting where she came from. She does this by writing several other words besides her name in class. Through these new words she imagines an easier way of life (other than being the new kid, who doesn't speak English, who the teacher doesn't like). In the end, Yoon realizes that "maybe being different is good," and embraces Yoon which still "means shining wisdom" in English.
In this picturebook, the illustrations are mostly watercolor with some line drawings. The softness in the colors and lines helped me to empathize with Yoon and her desire to both go back to Korea and fit in in her new school. The whimsical nature of her fantasies of being a CAT, a BIRD, a CUPCAKE are depicted in the illustrations and help the reader to see her thinking. Most of the illustrations are full page, bleeding over the edges, the last picture is particularly compelling to me. It is a two page spread, where Yoon and her new friend are in the center but not the largest images on the page. In fact, around the edges of the pictures you see parts of other children, creating a feeling that Yoon is no longer an "outsider" but has integrated into her new surroundings. Additionally, she is facing backwards in the picture looking at her new friend- which is a stark comparison to many of the other images in the text. This last picture really gave me a sense of closure and that Yoon, going forward, would do just fine.
This book can also be considered multicultural since it does focus on a Korean family's experience, particularly Yoon's, as they immigrated to America. What I appreciated about this text though was that it did not necessarily have to be a Korean family as the main character. The author could have swapped out this family for an Arabic, Indian, Japanese, Hebrew speaking family- any family whose writing system is not alphabetic as the writing plays a major role in the development of the story. Perhaps then, this becomes a culturally neutral book, where we see a culture represented (other than the dominant White culture) to tell a more universal story. In this vein, as a contemporary realistic fiction text and a multicultural one, we can likely have kids make many text-to-self connections as they read or hear this book.
Teachers may find this book useful to talk about new beginnings, being new to a school, feeling left out, making friends, the power of words, and active reading through making connections. Furthermore, connections to the Massachusetts ELA Framework include RL (Key Ideas and Details) 3 (characters), RL (Integration of Knowledge and Ideas) 7, and 8.
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