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readallthenewberys2012-10-05 01:00 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2012-10-05 01:00 am
Newbery Medal: Shen of the Sea, Chinese Stories for Children (Arthur Bowie Chrisman)
Hrum. Wikipedia assures me that the short-stories in this book are the original creations of Mr Arthur Bowie Chrisman, a Virginia native, but the back cover is trying extremely hard to convince me - without saying it flat out - that they are traditional Chinese folktales. I am Well Dubious. Granted, Mr Chrisman probably wasn't responsible for the back cover, as this looks like... yes, it is a reprint. 1968. O_O [ETA: He actually was responsible for the back cover - it's from an interview he gave. :P]
The thing is, being a pasty white person of whiteness, I am not really very familiar with what is offensive when writing about other cultures. But I suspect this book crosses the line.
* The acknowledgements page, done in free blank verse (or whatever you call it when you have neither rhythm nor rhyme but a lot of nonstandard line-breaks), is not reassuring me. It's... well. I think the best thing to do is quote it in full so you can judge for yourself. It just smells a bit odd, is all.
"I have heard
That the Plain of Fat Melons
Is more than flat.
It is hollowed like a bowl.
And my purse.
Was quite as flat.
Then the Philadelphia North American,
And What To Do, of Elgin,
Bought some of my stories--
Paying good round money--
Which the baker was quick to take from me.
Furthermore,
These papers
Have given permission
To put the stories in a Book.
And the Book
Is open before you.
The North American,
And What To Do,
Have been as kind to me
As Wu Ta Lang was
To the red cherry tree.
And I thank them--
Not once--but twice--
And twice that--
More times than there are leaves
In Hu Pei Forest."
I think that this is a classic example of Cultural Appropriation, i.e. bagging somebody else's culture to decorate your own words without paying any attention to which bits you're bagging or where they go, or even whether you're bagging bits that actually make sense or merely talking nonsense in their style.
(Completely, utterly irrelevantly: I think that is why I get so cranky about C.S. Lewis's use of some of J.R.R. Tolkien's terminology and character names from The Silmarillion in Lewis's space trilogy. He uses them WRONG, which has always made me cross, but... I only just figured out why. It was very much like cultural appropriation, except of a fictional culture. Which, I do understand, is not nearly as offensive as appropriating real people's culture! :P But I take that fictional culture very, very seriously. So now I think I understand, a little more intuitively, why cultural appropriation is so extremely offensive. And hopefully, that will help me in future to figure out if I am appropriating somebody's culture and how to stop doing it! *koff* End digression...)
* Table of Contents. WAIT A SECOND, I've read at least one of these! In an anthology, once. A very old anthology that had the original, pre-Lord of the Rings version of "Riddles in the Dark"!
* Mmmmkay. We have established, I think, that these are American stories "in a Chinese style", and as such, are full of ALL THE CULTURAL APPROPRIATION EVER. Looking at the story titles, I also see "hilarious" Chinese-y names such as Ah Mee, Ah Fun, Ah Tcha (do you know any actual Chinese people with the surname Ah? I don't think I've ever encountered one), and *groan* Hai Low. :P
* I think the only possible thing to do is try to barrel through and judge the stories as stories without the Chinese trappings, insofar as possible. We've established that it's a terrible book; let's see if it might have been a good book if Mr Chrisman hadn't decided Orientalism was the way to go. (Is "Oriental" still an offensive term when it's being used to describe an offensive -ism, or do the offensivenesses cancel out? I am confusing myself.)
* If any of the many, many Chinese-language words he's throwing in here are accurate, I'm not finding them on Google. (I know, there are many Chinese languages / dialects, especially Cantonese and Mandarin. I don't know what he was trying to do! o_O)
* The first story, so far, is about a parent who never spanks his son, and how horrible the son is in consequence. I've read this story before, and I know it will involve throwing things; I'm sort of vaguely considering throwing the book, already. ;-)
* Oh, Gordon Bennett. The father, Ching Chi, who doesn't spank his son Ah Mee, lives with his wife - "her name is forgotten" - and the son and "a little daughter", name also not given. I'M GOING TO DO A LADY COUNT ON YOU, Mr Arthur Bowie Chrisman! I don't normally pay attention to Bechdel-passing because it's so very, very rare (I can't think of a definite example in any of my fandoms off the bat, unless Kira and Jadzia bantering about eating giant spider-puppets counts), but YOU, SIR?! If you have not passed the Bechdel test by the end of the book, you get NO STARS. I mean it. :P I mean, seriously, that was BLATANT.
* And Ching Chi is not a rich man because his profession is carving awesome stuff, and he spends all his time carving toys for his kid. Who promptly chucks them through the paper-covered windows and doors. (Do traditional Chinese houses have those, or is that Japanese, or both? I googled, but I can't find out.) Yadda, yadda, yadda. WHAT A TERRIBLE PARENT, HE LIKES HIS LITTLE BOY.
* So Ah Mee happens to chuck an intricately carved building-block through the paper-covered door just as the King is riding by in his sedan chair. The King thinks it is very good carving, and makes Ching Chi a high lord, "the highest class of mandarin", signified by a ruby button on his cap. (On googling to see if mandarin was a born-into class or something you could be elevated to, I find that a mandarin was a scholar-bureaucrat who had to pass rigorous examinations, and that the clothing badge of a mandarin was a big square on the front of his robe, not a little round button a-top like the Grand Panjandrum of nonsense fame.)
* And Ah Mee "was worse than ever", and keeps throwing things, and likes to eat jam. Black, sticky, jam. So he snaffles some of his dad's carved wooden plaques, while Ching Chi is out one day, to use as plates for stolen jam - as he has been forbidden to put his hands in the jam jar, and takes an Amelia-Bedelia-esquely literal view of such utterances.
* So Ching Chi, when he finds his plaques all covered with jam, has a temper tantrum and throws them at the wall! Because... I have no idea why. Then his brother, Ching Cha, a writer, comes in and sees immediately the practical applications of this: printing.
* Oh, good GRIEF. "And so was invented Yin Shu (Make Books), or, as the very odd foreign demons call it in their so peculiar language--Printing." You get two more stories, Mr Arthur Bowie Chrisman, and if there is one more HINT of pidgin English, OUT YOU GO.
* The second story, "Shen of the Sea", gives its title to the book - and, oh dear, here is Mr Chrisman himself making an appearance in the first person.
* So in this story - Wiki isn't telling me if the setup is true, or if (as the back of the book is claiming in near-Old Tobacco Shop-level prose) Arthur Bowie Chrisman ever lived in China at all - but in this story, he lives in Kua Hai City, below sea level in the concave Plain of Fat Melons, where there is a levee or dike to keep the sea out. He worries a bit when there are storms, whether the sea may overtop the levee and come drown him; so he asks his gardener if this has ever happened.
* The gardener is going to tell us the story, it seems, of how the first king of the area put the water demons in a bottle and buried it deep, so that now the sea cannot flood Kua Hai.
* Uh. As a geology student, I'm really, really enjoying this bit of the story? The land was much lower in the olden days, for it had not been built up; the sea was much higher, for no ships weighed it down (it is REALLY A SHAME that he is so terrible in his political correctness, for as a writer of cute ideas that kids would latch onto, he's great!); and the water demons felt that the sea was far too small and they should go take over some land to make the sea bigger. All of which amuses me greatly, because it makes me think of sea-level-rise animations (I can't find a good one, sadly) and... generally sounds like something one might actually hear in a really old folktale based on half-recalled memories of the last interglacial period.
* So the water demons come to the king of the plains city at night, and they tell him that they do not want to drown his people but they are going to take his land, and he can have until the cypress tree blooms to get all his people up the mountain where they will be safe. But they take too long in talking to him, and the sun rises and dries up all the dew. The water demons cannot live without dew, so they have to turn themselves into pebbles and lie in a water-bowl among the roots of a lilypad plant.
* The king promptly pops the pebbles into a bottle full of water and stoppers it and hides it. Of course.
* But later on, when the king's power has grown great, ambassadors come from other regions of China offering him allegiance, and the palace people throw a massive party. And a servant (a foolish servant, because of course no wise servant ransacking the palace for dainties to feed honored guests would ever check what was inside an opaque bottle :P) opens the bottle, and the water demons escape. More than that - they see the ambassadors' bright-colored laundry hanging to dry on the cypress tree, assume it's blooming, and flood the whole place!
* About a thousand of the population escape. Among them is the King. Why, I don't know, except that Arthur Bowie Chrisman seems to be terribly fond of kings.
* The water demons hang around to mock the king, but eventually he goes and shouts very loud, "I know how I shall regain my city!" and goes off - he says - to write down his plan. So he sits down by a potted lilypad plant and scribbles, and the water demons sneak into the lilypad pot as pebbles, to try to see what he's writing. And he promptly bottles them up again, all but the littlest one, whom he forces to take the sea away off his kingdom under threat of having his brothers all killed. (I don't see that it's any BETTER that the king buries the bottled brothers deep in an unknown spot, but whatever. I'm not a water demon, what do I know? ;P)
* "How Wise Were the Old Men" is the story of a mischievous young mimic who attributes all his fortune, good or bad, to his talent for imitating animal sounds - and he's usually right. (Although he only succeeds in most of his tricks because everyone else in the story is an utter idiot and he himself isn't much better.) There's another lady in this one: the wife of a King who's had the mimic, Meng Hu, imprisoned. Her only purpose in the story is for Meng Hu to imitate her voice and demand that the guards open all the doors because her poor little Chow dog (which Meng Hu also imitates) has been locked up somewhere in the prison, oh noes! I AM NOT IMPRESSED, ARTHUR BOWIE CHRISMAN.
* One more story?
* Um, NO. Story number four, "Chop-Sticks", quickly runs into the Curse of the Terrible Pidgin English - "Ching Chung frequently complimented Cheng Chang upon his so glorious cookery" and "To the Gracious Master I offer my no-account thanks. I sorrow that my terrible cooking is not better" - and then immediately goes into a massive fit of major misogyny, when Cheng Chang the cook gets married and promptly becomes a pauper because his wife terrifies him so badly while he's cooking that he keeps having to throw away roast ducks. And then, after she goes away on a visit and he becomes able to cook again, his master Ching Chung (who has become King in the interim, because of reasons) abdicates in his favor because his cooking is so super-excellent.
ON WHICH, the wife's three brothers each attempt in turn to murder Cheng Chang with eating implements, and when King Cheng Chang wishes to have them executed, his wife forbids it or she will beat him. HA HA HOW FUNNY. :PPPP Anyway, the point of the story is, that Cheng Chang abolishes eating implements and institutes the use of chopsticks... and now I am done with this book, even though there are thirteen more stories and 150 more pages.
The thing is, being a pasty white person of whiteness, I am not really very familiar with what is offensive when writing about other cultures. But I suspect this book crosses the line.
* The acknowledgements page, done in free blank verse (or whatever you call it when you have neither rhythm nor rhyme but a lot of nonstandard line-breaks), is not reassuring me. It's... well. I think the best thing to do is quote it in full so you can judge for yourself. It just smells a bit odd, is all.
"I have heard
That the Plain of Fat Melons
Is more than flat.
It is hollowed like a bowl.
And my purse.
Was quite as flat.
Then the Philadelphia North American,
And What To Do, of Elgin,
Bought some of my stories--
Paying good round money--
Which the baker was quick to take from me.
Furthermore,
These papers
Have given permission
To put the stories in a Book.
And the Book
Is open before you.
The North American,
And What To Do,
Have been as kind to me
As Wu Ta Lang was
To the red cherry tree.
And I thank them--
Not once--but twice--
And twice that--
More times than there are leaves
In Hu Pei Forest."
I think that this is a classic example of Cultural Appropriation, i.e. bagging somebody else's culture to decorate your own words without paying any attention to which bits you're bagging or where they go, or even whether you're bagging bits that actually make sense or merely talking nonsense in their style.
(Completely, utterly irrelevantly: I think that is why I get so cranky about C.S. Lewis's use of some of J.R.R. Tolkien's terminology and character names from The Silmarillion in Lewis's space trilogy. He uses them WRONG, which has always made me cross, but... I only just figured out why. It was very much like cultural appropriation, except of a fictional culture. Which, I do understand, is not nearly as offensive as appropriating real people's culture! :P But I take that fictional culture very, very seriously. So now I think I understand, a little more intuitively, why cultural appropriation is so extremely offensive. And hopefully, that will help me in future to figure out if I am appropriating somebody's culture and how to stop doing it! *koff* End digression...)
* Table of Contents. WAIT A SECOND, I've read at least one of these! In an anthology, once. A very old anthology that had the original, pre-Lord of the Rings version of "Riddles in the Dark"!
* Mmmmkay. We have established, I think, that these are American stories "in a Chinese style", and as such, are full of ALL THE CULTURAL APPROPRIATION EVER. Looking at the story titles, I also see "hilarious" Chinese-y names such as Ah Mee, Ah Fun, Ah Tcha (do you know any actual Chinese people with the surname Ah? I don't think I've ever encountered one), and *groan* Hai Low. :P
* I think the only possible thing to do is try to barrel through and judge the stories as stories without the Chinese trappings, insofar as possible. We've established that it's a terrible book; let's see if it might have been a good book if Mr Chrisman hadn't decided Orientalism was the way to go. (Is "Oriental" still an offensive term when it's being used to describe an offensive -ism, or do the offensivenesses cancel out? I am confusing myself.)
* If any of the many, many Chinese-language words he's throwing in here are accurate, I'm not finding them on Google. (I know, there are many Chinese languages / dialects, especially Cantonese and Mandarin. I don't know what he was trying to do! o_O)
* The first story, so far, is about a parent who never spanks his son, and how horrible the son is in consequence. I've read this story before, and I know it will involve throwing things; I'm sort of vaguely considering throwing the book, already. ;-)
* Oh, Gordon Bennett. The father, Ching Chi, who doesn't spank his son Ah Mee, lives with his wife - "her name is forgotten" - and the son and "a little daughter", name also not given. I'M GOING TO DO A LADY COUNT ON YOU, Mr Arthur Bowie Chrisman! I don't normally pay attention to Bechdel-passing because it's so very, very rare (I can't think of a definite example in any of my fandoms off the bat, unless Kira and Jadzia bantering about eating giant spider-puppets counts), but YOU, SIR?! If you have not passed the Bechdel test by the end of the book, you get NO STARS. I mean it. :P I mean, seriously, that was BLATANT.
* And Ching Chi is not a rich man because his profession is carving awesome stuff, and he spends all his time carving toys for his kid. Who promptly chucks them through the paper-covered windows and doors. (Do traditional Chinese houses have those, or is that Japanese, or both? I googled, but I can't find out.) Yadda, yadda, yadda. WHAT A TERRIBLE PARENT, HE LIKES HIS LITTLE BOY.
* So Ah Mee happens to chuck an intricately carved building-block through the paper-covered door just as the King is riding by in his sedan chair. The King thinks it is very good carving, and makes Ching Chi a high lord, "the highest class of mandarin", signified by a ruby button on his cap. (On googling to see if mandarin was a born-into class or something you could be elevated to, I find that a mandarin was a scholar-bureaucrat who had to pass rigorous examinations, and that the clothing badge of a mandarin was a big square on the front of his robe, not a little round button a-top like the Grand Panjandrum of nonsense fame.)
* And Ah Mee "was worse than ever", and keeps throwing things, and likes to eat jam. Black, sticky, jam. So he snaffles some of his dad's carved wooden plaques, while Ching Chi is out one day, to use as plates for stolen jam - as he has been forbidden to put his hands in the jam jar, and takes an Amelia-Bedelia-esquely literal view of such utterances.
* So Ching Chi, when he finds his plaques all covered with jam, has a temper tantrum and throws them at the wall! Because... I have no idea why. Then his brother, Ching Cha, a writer, comes in and sees immediately the practical applications of this: printing.
* Oh, good GRIEF. "And so was invented Yin Shu (Make Books), or, as the very odd foreign demons call it in their so peculiar language--Printing." You get two more stories, Mr Arthur Bowie Chrisman, and if there is one more HINT of pidgin English, OUT YOU GO.
* The second story, "Shen of the Sea", gives its title to the book - and, oh dear, here is Mr Chrisman himself making an appearance in the first person.
* So in this story - Wiki isn't telling me if the setup is true, or if (as the back of the book is claiming in near-Old Tobacco Shop-level prose) Arthur Bowie Chrisman ever lived in China at all - but in this story, he lives in Kua Hai City, below sea level in the concave Plain of Fat Melons, where there is a levee or dike to keep the sea out. He worries a bit when there are storms, whether the sea may overtop the levee and come drown him; so he asks his gardener if this has ever happened.
* The gardener is going to tell us the story, it seems, of how the first king of the area put the water demons in a bottle and buried it deep, so that now the sea cannot flood Kua Hai.
* Uh. As a geology student, I'm really, really enjoying this bit of the story? The land was much lower in the olden days, for it had not been built up; the sea was much higher, for no ships weighed it down (it is REALLY A SHAME that he is so terrible in his political correctness, for as a writer of cute ideas that kids would latch onto, he's great!); and the water demons felt that the sea was far too small and they should go take over some land to make the sea bigger. All of which amuses me greatly, because it makes me think of sea-level-rise animations (I can't find a good one, sadly) and... generally sounds like something one might actually hear in a really old folktale based on half-recalled memories of the last interglacial period.
* So the water demons come to the king of the plains city at night, and they tell him that they do not want to drown his people but they are going to take his land, and he can have until the cypress tree blooms to get all his people up the mountain where they will be safe. But they take too long in talking to him, and the sun rises and dries up all the dew. The water demons cannot live without dew, so they have to turn themselves into pebbles and lie in a water-bowl among the roots of a lilypad plant.
* The king promptly pops the pebbles into a bottle full of water and stoppers it and hides it. Of course.
* But later on, when the king's power has grown great, ambassadors come from other regions of China offering him allegiance, and the palace people throw a massive party. And a servant (a foolish servant, because of course no wise servant ransacking the palace for dainties to feed honored guests would ever check what was inside an opaque bottle :P) opens the bottle, and the water demons escape. More than that - they see the ambassadors' bright-colored laundry hanging to dry on the cypress tree, assume it's blooming, and flood the whole place!
* About a thousand of the population escape. Among them is the King. Why, I don't know, except that Arthur Bowie Chrisman seems to be terribly fond of kings.
* The water demons hang around to mock the king, but eventually he goes and shouts very loud, "I know how I shall regain my city!" and goes off - he says - to write down his plan. So he sits down by a potted lilypad plant and scribbles, and the water demons sneak into the lilypad pot as pebbles, to try to see what he's writing. And he promptly bottles them up again, all but the littlest one, whom he forces to take the sea away off his kingdom under threat of having his brothers all killed. (I don't see that it's any BETTER that the king buries the bottled brothers deep in an unknown spot, but whatever. I'm not a water demon, what do I know? ;P)
* "How Wise Were the Old Men" is the story of a mischievous young mimic who attributes all his fortune, good or bad, to his talent for imitating animal sounds - and he's usually right. (Although he only succeeds in most of his tricks because everyone else in the story is an utter idiot and he himself isn't much better.) There's another lady in this one: the wife of a King who's had the mimic, Meng Hu, imprisoned. Her only purpose in the story is for Meng Hu to imitate her voice and demand that the guards open all the doors because her poor little Chow dog (which Meng Hu also imitates) has been locked up somewhere in the prison, oh noes! I AM NOT IMPRESSED, ARTHUR BOWIE CHRISMAN.
* One more story?
* Um, NO. Story number four, "Chop-Sticks", quickly runs into the Curse of the Terrible Pidgin English - "Ching Chung frequently complimented Cheng Chang upon his so glorious cookery" and "To the Gracious Master I offer my no-account thanks. I sorrow that my terrible cooking is not better" - and then immediately goes into a massive fit of major misogyny, when Cheng Chang the cook gets married and promptly becomes a pauper because his wife terrifies him so badly while he's cooking that he keeps having to throw away roast ducks. And then, after she goes away on a visit and he becomes able to cook again, his master Ching Chung (who has become King in the interim, because of reasons) abdicates in his favor because his cooking is so super-excellent.
ON WHICH, the wife's three brothers each attempt in turn to murder Cheng Chang with eating implements, and when King Cheng Chang wishes to have them executed, his wife forbids it or she will beat him. HA HA HOW FUNNY. :PPPP Anyway, the point of the story is, that Cheng Chang abolishes eating implements and institutes the use of chopsticks... and now I am done with this book, even though there are thirteen more stories and 150 more pages.
no subject
That's sort of the definition of passing the Bechdel test, don't worry. :D
As for the rest of this, what. NO, guys. NOOOOOO. Augh.
no subject
(Let's let THEM be the Newbery committee. I bet I'd have a lot better list of books to read. XD)
Things that would be practically impossible to figure out without doing a lot more reading of terrible 1920s kidlit than I already am: The Newbery Awards As Run By the Ops Crew of Deep Space Nine (Plus Odo And Quark).