Peiling and the Chicken-fried Christmas
Bloomsbury, 2007
'Tis the season for lots of folly. It's a joyful time, sure, but we get a lot of mixed messages about what to want, what to give, how to feel, and so on. Pauline Chen's fifth-grade heroine, Peiling, longs to have Christmas, like everyone else. She convinces her Taiwanese-American family to celebrate the holiday for the first time, and predictably, it doesn't quite live up to her expectations. The theme of Chen's sympathetic story is identity, and readers with a literary bent will appreciate the embedded play, "The Prince and the Pauper," in which Peiling co-stars. Plot and characters are somewhat conventional, even the quirkiness of Peiling's teacher Miss Rosenweig is conventional. I also have an overly keen radar for things my mom would say, think, or want—that's just the baggage that comes with being an ABC—and there were moments when Peiling set it off. Perhaps this was deliberate, as Chen may get her tween audience to think about their parents' point of view, flawed but motivated by their best intentions. Light and warm and comforting...like a cup of instant milk tea.
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