I WROTE HANNA’s STORY as an attempt at a painful reconciliation.
Among the most beloved of my childhood books were those written by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read them all many times—so often that to this day, fifty years later, I still know countless phrases and passages by heart. As an adult, I have met numerous immigrants and children of immigrants who, like me, adored the Wilder books. My theory is that we saw them as providing a kind of road map to becoming American. We believed—mistakenly, as I would later learn—that if we made maple-snow candy and a nine-patch quilt and a corncob doll (and named it Susan) just as Laura had, we might, one day and somehow, be as American as she was.
Of the eight Wilder books published during her lifetime, the last four are set in De Smet, South Dakota. As a child, I would lie in bed night after night, imagining that I, too, lived in De Smet in the 1880s, and that I was Laura’s best friend.
I had to do some pretty fancy mental gymnastics to get myself to De Smet during that era. There were no Koreans in the US at the time; the first group of Koreans to immigrate here would not arrive until the early 1900s, and they would land in Hawaii, not on the continent. There were, however, thousands of Chinese immigrants, most of them on the West Coast. They had arrived in two main waves: during the Gold Rush years of the 1840s and ’50s, and to help build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. Census records of 1875 show a population of Chinese in Deadwood, South Dakota, about 350 miles west of De Smet.
There were certainly people in China at the time who were half-Korean. So during those nighttime imaginings, I became an Asian girl living in De Smet—a Chinese girl with some Korean blood.
The Wilder books were set in the Midwest, the very region in which I lived. The stories I invented were a pre-internet version of fan fiction. They were usually rosy romances. In Wilder’s These Happy Golden Years, Laura is courted by Almanzo. They get engaged and finally marry. Meanwhile, I was being courted by Almanzo’s handsome friend, Cap Garland.
Even at the height of my passion for those books, there were parts that I found puzzling and distressing. The character of Ma was the most problematic. Her values of propriety and obedience over everything else seemed to me both misplaced and stifling.
And Ma hated Native Americans. In several episodes throughout the series, she expresses that hatred. While I could not have articulated it at the time, I harbored a deeply personal sense of dismay over Ma’s attitude. Ultimately it meant that she would never have allowed Laura to become friends with someone like me. Someone with black hair and dark eyes and tan skin. Someone who wasn’t white.
The racism that Hanna confronts is largely autobiographical: I have faced almost exactly the same incidents of racism depicted in the book. Whether outright hostility from strangers or thoughtless microaggressions from closer to home, such encounters are frequent, even daily, occurrences for me and almost every black or brown person I know. Racism is, however, not a series of incidents. Rather, the incidents are evidence of deeply ingrained states of personal bias and institutional injustice.
It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I learned something of the true history of the devastating effect that westward expansion had on Native Americans. Likewise, the true histories of other people of color here in the US are largely missing from our educational curricula and our national consciousness. The dearth of stories centered on the struggles and contributions of people of color has resulted in the pervasive, harmful, and sometimes even deadly attitude that we are not as fully human as whites. Those stories are of vital importance to every single one of us living in this country. To ignore them is an incalculable loss, because learning their truths makes us stronger and more capable of facing the challenges in our communities.
In Little Town on the Prairie, Pa takes part in a blackface minstrel show. The show is an obvious delight to Laura and the other members of the all-white audience. While both Laura and Pa in the books are often at odds with Ma’s mistrust of Native Americans, the portrayal of blackface evinces no such qualms.
There are those who argue that Wilder cannot be faulted for that attitude because she was “a product of her time.” Others point out that this is no excuse for treating any members of the human race as “lesser”—that there have been people in every time and place who have risen above the limitations of standard social mores. While I agree with the latter sentiment, I also can’t help pondering which of our current and widely held attitudes will be found lacking by future generations. Is our vision any clearer than that of our forebears?
Fans of Wilder’s work will, I hope, be able to recognize where I have both acknowledged and challenged her stories. The town of LaForge is modeled on De Smet, the locations of the homes and businesses based on the map that Wilder herself drew and labeled. The Harris family is partly inspired by the Ingallses; Dolly Swenson might remind readers of Nellie Oleson. As part of the research for this book, I visited De Smet, South Dakota, and Mansfield, Missouri, the two main sites for Wilder pilgrimage.
(A note to those who love the television series Little House on the Prairie: I may have watched one or two episodes as a child, but no more than that. I can clearly remember my fury on seeing that the actor playing Pa had no beard, and that alone was enough to cause me to boycott the show.)
In Chapter 5, there is a mention of a plant called “yansam” in Chinese. The Korean word is “insam”—ginseng in English. Korean ginseng has been prized throughout Asia for centuries for its medicinal qualities, used for everything from memory loss and fatigue to heart conditions and diabetes. As of this writing, scientific studies are inconclusive as to ginseng’s effectiveness.
Other parts of the book are based on historical events, including the Los Angeles riots of 1871 (Chapter 2); the mentions of the Sioux treaty with the US government (Chapters 1 and 21); the Gold Rush at Pike’s Peak in Colorado (Chapter 2). The one historical figure mentioned in the story is James Harvey Strobridge, construction foreman of the Central Pacific Railroad (Chapter 20). Initially reluctant to hire Chinese men, and always ruling them with an iron fist, Strobridge eventually grew to admire them as workers. “The Chinese are the best workers in the world! They learn quickly, do not fight, have no strikes that amount to anything and are very clean in their habits. They will gamble and do quarrel among themselves most noisily—but harmlessly.” (James Harvey Strobridge, quoted in Erle Heath, “From Trail to Rail,” Southern Pacific Bulletin, XV, Chapter XV, May 1927, 12.)
To research the scenes where Hanna encounters Wichapiwin, I visited the Pine Ridge Reservation and several other important Native sites in South Dakota, including Wounded Knee and the Crazy Horse Memorial. At Pine Ridge, I was privileged to have as my guide Donovin Sprague, Lakota author, historian, and teacher. Mr. Sprague helped me track down a braid of prairie turnip, which I soaked and cooked just as Hanna does in the story. I also attended an intertribal mini-powwow in Fargo, North Dakota, where I learned more about Native life, both historical and contemporary. I was especially moved by hearing the powerful honor songs.
A note on terminology: I have used the words “Sioux” and “Indian” because that is what people in Hanna’s time would have used. Had the white population in Dakota Territory been interested, they could have learned that Wichapiwin and her companions were members of the Ihanktonwan tribe, Dakota speakers of the Oceti Sakowin Nation. The Ihanktonwan (Yankton) Reservation is south of De Smet; Hanna and Papa would have driven nearby on their way to the town.
I also chose to include a few lines of Dakota dialogue. I felt strongly about including those words in an effort to counteract previous generations of innumerable children’s books that have never depicted or even acknowledged Native languages, and the stereotypes of Hollywood that reduced Native communication to grunts and pidgin. Today, many indigenous nations are working hard on language revitalization programs.
In a letter to her daughter, Rose, in April 1921, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about greeting an African American man at a meeting of her local farm loan association: “Our colored member was there and when he was introduced to me I shook hands with him which nearly paralyzed some of the others.” (Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, ed. William Anderson [New York: HarperCollins, 2016], 28.)
I like to think of that handshake as a clue to how Wilder might have reacted to Prairie Lotus. The Little House stories were written years after that letter; her awareness had not grown enough for her to deal with the harmful scenes in her books. But I hope she might have been open to learning how her work affected a young Midwestern Asian girl who grew up to be a writer.
Prairie Lotus is a story I have been writing nearly all my life. It is an attempt to reconcile my childhood love of the Little House books with my adult knowledge of their painful shortcomings. My wish is that this book will provide food for thought for all who read it, especially the young readers in whose hands the future lies.