I am the author of my life: Asian American girls writing creative revolutionary mystories about culture, conflict, and identity

The purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which Asian American girls write their own identities and cultures through acts of creation and creative revolutionary mystories. This study investigates the ways in which five Asian American girls ages 10--13 navigate their way through their own identities as well as through the multiple cultures of which they are a part. Through the girls' own processes of building their identities and cultures, they are writing their own mystories into the national imaginary as an act of revolution. By abandoning the hyphenated "Asian-American," this study articulates both Asian and American identities in innovative ways that offer new ontological and epistemological paradigms and choices.;Asian American creative revolutionary mystories involve the interweaving of three components: (1) authorship, (2) power, and (3) the expression of identity. In essence, engaging in a process of creation is engaging in a process of writing selves. As history supports, the ways in which many Asian cultures have functioned in the U.S. and the ways in which Asians disrupt dominant ideology is not primarily through visible and radical confrontation. Writing one's own mystory from a place of power and agency allows marginal groups to perform in the center. Creating a mystory does not negate the socio-historical context of oppression. Rather, creating a mystory acknowledges that same history while expressing one's freedom from it. In this study, instead of "decentering" hegemony from a marginal standpoint, Asian American girls act as agents, "centering" themselves in their writing thus gaining a sense of empowerment within dominant ideologies.;This is an arts-based research study in which methods included participant observation, interviews, and arts-based creative workshops as well as hands-on Theatre for Social Change activities. These different data collection methods allowed for a gathering of multifaceted samplings of culture and identity in the participants' lives. The participants in this study define and disassemble terms like "culture" and "identity" through their behaviors and words. Additional analysis included the collecting of artifacts and documents that emerged from the participants' daily lives that they deemed part of their concepts of identity and culture.