Change and difference

Sometimes we long for change, but change can be hard. The same goes for difference. And if those are already challenging for us, how do we explain to our children? These three authors treat their child protagonists with compassion, and as each realizes how to accept themselves and others, they give us lessons for becoming better people.

Cooper is coping with his Korean-American identity. It seems to be an impossible situation when his Korean language ability is slim, and yet he is regularly confronted with the loaded question, "What are you?" When the answer, "an American," doesn't satisfy, he must consider whether and to what extent he is Korean. Shame and confusion lead him to act impulsively and wrongly, but in doing so, Peter gets to know the Korean-American grocer who offers Cooper a chance to redeem himself. The bilingual English-Korean edition of Sun Yung Shin's Cooper's Lesson may be especially appealing to multi-generational families.

Kimiko Sakai's Sachiko is young, confused, and a little scared by the effects of Alzheimer's disease on her beloved grandmother. Sachiko remembers and misses the grandmother who was coherent and made her feel safe and loved. Now her grandmother is old, but speaks in a voice that is young, confused, and a little scared. At first, Sachiko reacts with petulance and resentment, leading her grandmother on a ruse. But along the way, she learns that she who is still coherent now has the capacity to make another feel safe and loved. Tomie Arai's illustrations for Sachiko Means Happiness effortlessly capture with equal compassion the complex psychology of the characters.

Our sensitive young narrator of Uncle Peter's Amazing Chinese Wedding is niece Jenny. A good observer, she is our knowledgeable guide to Chinese wedding rituals and their symbolism. While activities may be quite different from a western-style wedding, emotions are the same. Her family feels joy and anticipation, but Jenny also feels fear as she worries about being displaced by Peter's bride, Stella. But savvy and thoughtful Aunt Stella brings Jenny away from fear and back into the family fold. Yumi Heo's child-like images capture the anxiety and wonder of Jenny's point of view.

Cooper's Lesson

Sun Yung Shin (author) and Kim Cogan (illustrator)

Children's Book Press, 2004

Sachiko Means Happiness

Kimiko Sakai

Chidren's Book Press, 1997

Uncle Peter's Amazing Chinese Wedding

Lenore Look (author) and Yumi Heo (illustrator)

Atheneum, 2006

A silk yarn

Red Butterfly, a medieval Chinese princess, spins a yarn as light and soft as silk, naturally. Told in first-person, her story is a prose-poem, part ode and part lament. Red Butterfly enjoys many beautiful splendors of her father's kingdom, but she must also bear a burden peculiar to her station, namely an arranged marriage to a Khotanese king. In her long farewell, she lists the many splendors and repeatedly bids goodbye to things, places, people, and ultimately to her self as she knows it. To assuage her anticipated homesickness, she smuggles silkworms in her copious silken sleeves. The worms, ostensibly, will multiply and produce one luxury from home, a kind of living memory for her future Khotanese highness. With images that keep the eye spinning and twirling about, the book is chinoisserie for kids, girls especially. Red Butterfly's world is a frothy fantasy of a faraway land where princesses are beautiful and dutiful. The nostalgic tone banishes concerns for the nitty-gritty implications of patriarchy and details of history (Deborah Noyes' note partially makes up for the deficit, but there are some errors here, too). Still, children and parents may also see the story as a successful example of self-soothing.

Red Butterfly: How a Princess Smuggled the Secret of Silk Out of China
Deborah Noyes (author) and Sophie Blackall (illustrator)
Candlewick, 2007

Paper Inventions

These days the trend is to go paperless. Still, paper is a marvelous (and need it be said, Chinese) invention, which in turn continues to spark creativity around the world. Here are three books that pay tribute, in different ways, to paper arts.

Stefan Czernecki's Paper Lanterns is concerned with the transmission of cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. Old Chen, the finest paper lantern craftsman in China, has two less than ideal apprentices. Entranced by the beauty and magic of the lanterns, Little Mouse accepts a lower status job cleaning after Master and apprentices. But, in doing so, he carefully observes and learns the craft. When the Lantern Festival arrives, naturally, Little Mouse succeeds Old Chen. Much about the book seems so promising—the allure of a beautiful craft, the rivalry and triumph of the modest—but Paper Lanterns does not burn so brightly. Text and illustrations seem flat and, well, caricatured. Unimportant to the plot, the cartoonish portrait of Mao, at once jubilant and eerie, captures the book's superficial feel.


Marguerite Davol's The Paper Dragon features characters, elements, and vignettes drawn from Chinese history, culture, and literature, but altered and combined in unexpected ways. The story's main character is an artist named Mi Fei. Apart from talent, however, Davol's Mi shares little in common with his rather snobbish and eccentric namesake. Good-natured, courageous, and clever, Mi is popular among his neighbors who seek him to confront the dragon Sui Jen. Like Mi Fei, Sui Jen would be unrecognizable to a typical Chinese reader who connotes dragons with water and benevolence. When Mi pleads with Sui Jen to cease scorching the tea bushes and other destructive actions, Sui Jen responds with three challenges in the form of riddles involving paper. Mi calls upon his artistic background and painterly talent to save his fellow villagers. In this test of wits, we are on Mi's side and share his goodwill by accepting Davol's Asian fusion approach. But she pushes us with the lesson of love, which reads like a sermon to children masquerading as a message from the ostensibly Chinese, and therefore Confucian Mi Fei. If you are willing to go with the intercultural patchwork, however, you will get the added pleasure of Robert Sabuda's illustrations. Each double page-spread extends to form long horizontal compositions of richly colored and finely executed papercuts. They are dramatic and dazzling.

Monica Chang's retelling, Story of the Chinese Zodiac, makes it into this trio because of Arthur Lee's illustrations, which are nothing less that a papery tour-de-force. You could probably retell your own version of the race among animals in which the rat outfoxes the cat with a fib and outpaces his competitors with a lift from the ox and thus claims first place among the twelve finishers. After all, you've rehearsed the tale every February (and the occasional January). But, I promise, you will see the race through new eyes because Lee has taken techniques of origami and kirigami to the next level in designs that are fresh and alive. These paper animals jump off the page and into our world. Some of you may also appreciate the bilingual edition in English and traditional Chinese.

Stefan Czernecki
Paper Lanterns
Charlesbridge, 2001

Marguerite W. Davol (author) and Robert Sabuda (illustrator)
The Paper Dragon
Simon and Schuster, 1997

Monica Chang (author), Arthur Lee (illustrator), and Rick Charette (English translation)
Story of the Chinese Zodiac
Yuan-liou,1994

(this cover is to the English/Spanish edition, but the illustration is the same)

Dreaming outside the box

For a general American audience, I suspect there isn't anything obviously Asian about Ayano Imai's The 108th Sheep. But those of you in the know have a special place in your heart for the number 108, right? In Buddhist practice (and possibly in that of other religions, too), the number has significance, a kind of supreme, utmost quality, which returns us to the beginning that is 1. The 108th sheep is the one that marks the end of Emma's sheep-filled, but sleepless night. And that is when she must dream outside the box. Imai's illustrations are a little Tim Burton, a little Shaun the Sheep, and altogether her own. I don't think any expense has been spared in producing the richly textured, generously sized pages in this sparingly gorgeous book.

Ayano Imai
The 108th Sheep
ME Media, 2006

Another retelling

After Tikki Tikki Tembo, Arlene Mosel and Blair Lent directed their collective talents to Japanese culture in The Funny Little Woman. Readers of my earlier review won't be surprised by the following mixed response. Once again the pictures are engaging and delightful, and once again the story is a combination of wicked humor, appealing silliness, and local color, this time involving the eponymous funny little woman, a lost dumpling, underground Jizo sculptures, and monstrous oni. Still, there is an uneasiness about the claim to "retelling" an indigenous Japanese folk tale. Readers with more familiarity and expertise, what say you about the resourceful if somewhat laughable little woman who escaped the oni and acquired fame and fortune through magic and dumplings, and who exclaimed all the while, "Oh, tee-he-he-he"? By the way, this book won the Caldecott Medal.

Arlene Mosel (author) and Blair Lent (illustrator)
The Funny Little Woman
E.P. Dutton, 1972

Tikki's sticky tempo

Someone read to me when I was seven or eight years old Arlene Mosel's Tikki Tikki Tembo, and that name, slightly modified, stuck in my head ever since. I remembered it as "Ricky Ticky Tembo no-sar rembo chari-bari boochee pip perry pembo (curious readers must seek the book itself for the true name). The silly long name was more fun to say than the better known childhood favorite, super-cali-fragil-istic-exme-ala-do-cious. Well, it was on the one hand a genuine pleasure to read this book again (the name still skips and dances off the tongue) and to see the artful and whimsical illustrations of Blair Lent. On the other hand, I found it a little disturbing to realize the completely fabricated explanation for the brevity of Chinese names (mine is, of course, no exception). Such presumption smacks of cultural chauvinism. It was also upsetting to see the disparity in mother's affection for her first and second sons, and I'll hazard that many readers today would shy away from a narrative involving a little boy drowning in a well. The cover states that the story is "retold" by Mosel, but she provides no further information about a source. Does anyone know of an indigenous predecessor?

Arlene Mosel (author) and Blair Lent (illustrator)
Tikki Tikki Tembo
Henry Holt, 1968

A gift for whom?

I don't want to sound the Scrooge (especially as the holiday season nears), but I didn't particularly like Yong Chen's The Gift. The story involves a common theme for immigrant families, the separation of siblings and attempts to bridge the distance. In this case, the acute loneliness felt by Amy's mother is assuaged by a letter and a gift from her brothers and sister. But, the gift is not for her. It is a pendant necklace carved in the shape of a cavorting dragon for daughter Amy. After receiving the gift, Amy and her mother are all smiles and locked into a blissful embrace. Oddly, of all the characters in the story, Amy (ostensibly, the American) is the only one wearing ethnic dress: a padded red-jacket with a satiny sheen and high collar. I think the subtext here is a concern for the aspirations and fears felt by Amy's mother about her daughter's connection to her Chinese heritage and extended family. The on-coming Chinese holiday is but a trigger for that concern. After all, why should a gift to her daughter so effectively ameliorate her own loneliness? I think this book is more about maternal fantasies and less sensitive to children's dreams. Text and illustrations will likely be soothing for mothers like Amy's.

Yong Chen
A Gift
Boyds Mills Press, 2009