More Japanese kitties

Margaret Hodges (adapted by)
and Aki Sogabe (illustrations)
The Boy Who Drew Cats
Holiday House, 2002

Margaret Hodges' story of Japanese zen monk and artist Sesshū Tōyō (1420-1506) as a boy is charming and suspenseful. In many ways, the young Sesshū is like any other boy, quick but easily distracted. But his obsession with painting cats everywhere—temple columns and walls, and fusuma (sliding doors)—sets him apart. The habit impels the narrative forward and generates the happy ending. Aki Sogabe's illustrations rise to the challenge of depicting one of Japan's most famous artists. They have the thick line and flat colors of modern woodblock prints, which might sound dull, but quite the opposite. The images are fresh, and the expressive cats, which teeter towards madness in their bizarre combination of domestication and wildness, steal the show.

Writing pictures

Two idiomatic phrases in the Chinese culture and in the west, respectively, yoke together images and words. Chinese scholar-painters, hewing to high-minded literary ideals, liked to think of their artistic practice as "writing pictures." Thus, their paintings would be infused with poetic and calligraphic sensibility. In the west, the phrase "a picture paints a thousand words" suggests how a single image can capture and convey in an instant a human saga. Pictures have a way of reaching across cultures and generations. Here are three books that deal, in different ways, with painting and childhood.

What I liked best about Peter's Painting was that Peter's ethnicity (signaled by facial features, hair texture, etc.) was purely incidental. Peter is an everychild, who channels his creativity into paintings of a bird that flies, a snake that slithers, and a fish that swims. Finally, Peter paints a door that opens into—you guessed it—the colorful world that Peter created. The text is simple and repetitive (think Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear).  And while the text and illustrations aren't the most memorable, it is refreshing to have a book in which a child with Asian features is treated just like anyone, and everyone else.

Before emigrating to Canada (following the Tiananmen tragedy of 1989), Song Nan Zhang experienced the ups and downs of life under Communism in the People's Republic of China, and eventually attained a professorial post in Beijing. Zhang channels his life, his optimism, and his talent into The Children of China: An Artist's Journey, which is one part autobiography, one part children's coffee-table book, and one part illustrated ethnography.  Each of these parts is compelling in its own way: Zhang's story is inspiring and hopeful, the book is filled with his colorful and sensitive paintings of children, and the children hail from many ethnicities that make up the PRC, including Tibetans, Mongolians, Kazakhs, Uygurs, and Yi. The map at the book's beginning helps us to locate the paintings geographically, and I like how easily the book replaces a mono-ethnic view of China. But because the book doesn't fit easily into any particular genre, presenting it to your children may be a challenge. It might be better consumed as a coffee table book, in a leisurely, non-linear fashion, and certainly it would be great in a classroom setting.

Zheng Zhensun and Alice Low's book about Wang Yani, A Young Painter, discusses the life and work of a talented girl from toddler-hood to early adolescence. The book is filled with photographs of Yani at work and at play, and lots of her paintings. The ones of mischievous monkeys are absolutely delightful. The book is substantial non-fiction (80 pages, including appendix, glossary, map, and index), and is thus especially rewarding for art enthusiasts. But, the many colorful paintings would be wonderful inspiration
to wider audiences old and young.

Sally Moss (author) Meredith Thomas (illustrator)

Peter's Painting

Mondo, 1995

Song Nan Zhang

The Children of China: An Artist's Journey

Tundra Books, 1995

Zheng Zhensun and Alice Low (authors)
A Young Painter: The Life and Paintings of Wang Yani—China's Extraordinary Young Artist
Scholastic, 1991

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)