My Name is Yoon, by Helen Recorvits

A School Girl From Korea Struggles to Feel at Home in America

Aug 23, 2008

After school I said to my father, "We should go back to Korea. It is better there." "Do not talk like that," he said. "America is your home now."

For generations, the children of immigrants have had to adapt to new schools, a new language and new ways of doing things. My Name is Yoon, by Helen Recorvits, with illustrations by Gabi Swiatkowska is a gentle tale of a young school girl whose family has just moved from Korea to the United States. Yoon must learn a new language – both written and spoken – and finds she does not like the way her name, which means “Shining Wisdom” in Korean, looks in English. “Lines. Circles. Each Standing alone.”

In a New World, Alone

Yoon, a top student with many friends in the country of her birth, struggles to find a feeling of belonging in her new school. The teacher frowns when she refuses to write her name in English. The “pony tail girl” sitting behind her laughs at her. Like the red robin she spots outside the classroom window, Yoon feels all alone.

Finding Her Place

Gradually, Yoon begins to open up and give her new teacher and classmates a chance. At her mother’s urging to be patient with everyone – including herself – she is encouraged to keep trying, and eventually begins to open her heart to her new surroundings, making a new friend, and gaining a new acceptance of herself.

Children who know what it’s like to be the new kid in class will relate to Yoon’s loneliness and hesitancy to open up. Children who haven’t had that experience will see an example of what it takes to be a friend to a child – any child – who seems left out.

Beautifully illustrated in warm, lush colors, My Name is Yoon was the winner of an Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award in 2004.

About the Author and Illustrator

Helen Recorvits is a graduate of Rhode Island College and is a second-grade teacher. Gabi Swiatkowska was born in Tychy, Poland, and attended the Lyceum of Art in Bielsko-Biala, as well as the Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. My Name is Yoon is the first in a series of books about Yoon: Helen Recorvits and Gabi Swiatkowska also collaborated on Yoon and the Christmas Mitten, published in 2006, in which Yoon learns about Christmas and the North Pole, and Yoon and the Jade Bracelet published August 2008, in which Yoon learns to rely on her “Shining Wisdom” to retrieve a precious keepsake.

(Frances Foster Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a division of Macmillan Books, 2004, ISBN-13: 978-0-374-35114-4; ISBN-10: 0-374-35114-7)

The copyright of the article My Name is Yoon, by Helen Recorvits in Children’s Books is owned by Gina Hannah. Permission to republish My Name is Yoon, by Helen Recorvits in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.