USING SCHOLARLY JOURNALS IN YOUR RESEARCH

By Traci Huahn

One of the scenes in my debut picture book faced being cut at the eleventh hour, but was saved thanks to some obscure information about 19th century fruits and vegetables that I found in two scholarly journals. 

I often turn to scholarly journals (meaning any kind of academic or peer-reviewed journal) as part of my research for a book. Since journal articles are written by experts in their field, they provide good overviews of a topic, put events and ideas into broader contexts, and be useful for tracking down primary sources.

One of my favorite sites for finding such articles is JSTOR. For those unfamiliar, JSTOR is a non-profit site that offers online access to thousands of digitized journal collections, open access books, images, primary sources and other materials from around the world. While some content requires you to be affiliated with a partner institution or have a paid subscription, I’ve found that most items are available using their free registration, allowing you to read all open access content and up to one hundred free views of licensed content each month.

To show how useful journal articles can be, the example that I’m sharing comes from my book Mamie Tape Fights to go to School: Based on a True Story (illustrated by Michelle Jing Chan, published by Crown Books for Young Readers). As a side note, though the book is historical fiction, the research for it was no less than for a nonfiction project and it was equally important to make sure that even fictionalized elements were as accurate and probable as possible. I won’t be going into detail about the ins and outs of nonfiction versus informational fiction or historical fiction, but for those interested in learning more, please check out this post by Colleen Paeff on Kirsten W. Larson’s blog and Nancy Churnin’s 2024 NF Fest post, both of which already offer excellent discussions.

Which brings us back to my dilemma about fruits and vegetables.

In the scene in question, the main character Mamie Tape plays alongside her siblings while their mom shops for ingredients to make a traditional Chinese New Year dish called jai, which contains mung bean noodles and vegetables like lily buds, fat choy, and bamboo shoots. Seems simple enough. Except that when the book went through my publisher’s final vetting, we received a note that mung bean noodles might not have been available in the United States at that time, and that fat choy and bamboo shoots were not yet being cultivated here.

We also got these comments about items shown in the art:

This scene (and two others that build off it) was based on Mamie Tape’s great-granddaughter telling me that when she was growing up, Mamie always helped prepare the jai for their family’s Chinese New Year meal. I also knew, from Mamie’s only-known interview, that their family had assimilated into mainstream American culture, but that food was one of the few Chinese traditions they kept. Of course, the fact that Mamie made and ate jai as an adult doesn’t necessarily mean she also did so as a child, so I fictionalized this detail, but it was important for it to still ring true to what could have been possible for the time period.

What to do? After a moment of panic, I thought about all the imported items I see when shopping at my local Asian market. Could any of the food sold in San Francisco Chinatown during Mamie’s time also have been imported?

I plugged in various search terms at JSTOR….and BINGO, up popped two articles! One in California Historical Society Quarterly, which references invoices from the U.S. Custom House in San Francisco, verifying that shipments of bamboo shoots and pomelos (among many other foods) were being imported from Hong Kong as early as the 1850s. And another, in Historical Archaeology, showing 19th-century ledgers from a California farm that employed Chinese workers listing groceries that included black fungus (an English translation for fat choy) and mung bean noodles.

With this information, the scene was saved! Some of the fruits that illustrator Michelle Jing Chan had chosen for the art had to be swapped out (sorry, lychee and durian!) but now armed with lists of other foods that could have been available, it was any easy fix.

So, next time you’re about to start new research, or when faced with a tricky last-minute detail, consider consulting some scholarly journals. If you’ve used JSTOR before, I’d be curious to know what you think of it and where its led you. And if you haven’t, I encourage you to poke around and see what you find!

Traci Huahn (she/her) writes books for kids and especially loves stories rooted in Asian American culture, history, and identity. Her debut picture book, Mamie Tape Fights to Go to School, illustrated by Michelle Jing Chan (Crown Books for Young Readers, 2024), won the Chinese American Librarians Association 2025 Best Book Award for Children's Non-fiction and was named a CBC Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People. Her next soon-to-be-announced picture book will be published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers in 2028. Follower her on IG at @tracihuahn and learn more at www.tracihuahn.com.