the Immigrant Experience
Review by Dr. Jerry Flack
Watercress is the most highly honored picture book of the year 2021. Rarely is a single book for young readers the winner of both the Caldecott Medal as the most distinguished American picture book of the year and also be named the recipient of a Newbery Honor citation for its outstanding contribution to children’s literature. Further, Watercress was named the best picture book about Asian/Pacific culture and heritage as presented by Asian Pacific American librarians. Watercress also received high praise from the New York Times and the Boston Globe-Hornbook publications.
Jason Chin is one of the most remarkable author-illustrators in American children’s literature today. Chin wrote and illustrated Your Place in the Universe (Holiday House, 2020) that was awarded the 2021 Cook Prize as the best American STEM book for youths in the year of its publication (2020). See the Gifted Development Center Newsletter and web page for the December, 2021 Book of the Month review of Your Place in the Universe.
Author Andrea Wang is a first-generation American citizen born to Chinese immigrant parents. Chin is a second generation Asian-American born to grandparents of Chinese birth and ancestry. Both the author and illustrator write deeply moving end notes about being members of American families that immigrated to the United States from their Chinese birth places.
Almost everything about Watercress from the story line to the artwork is both simple and basic yet deeply meaningful. The narration is purposelessly spare. On a family outing in a remote location in rural Ohio where virtually everyone else is white and not so poor, the young narrator (Andrea Wang’s alter ego) is on a car ride with her Chinese-born parents and her older brother in the family’s rusty and embarrassingly old-model (1970s) Pontiac. The narrator’s mother spies some watercress growing wildly in a muddy ditch that surrounds a corn field. Overjoyed at their find, the father stops the car and the mother of the family finds rusty scissors and a grocery store brown paper bag in the auto trunk. She directs her two children to take off their shoes and socks and roll up their jeans so they can plunge in to the cold, muddy ditch to gather enough watercress for a family meal. Best of all, her parents note that the healthy and delicious watercress, a life-sustaining food in their homeland, is free.
But the young Asian-American storyteller does not associate anything free with goodness. “Free” means hand-me-down clothes, roadside trash-heap furniture, and now dinner from a wayside ditch. Why can’t her family eat food from the grocery store like all the other families in their rural community? Has anyone she knows observed her family wading in a marshy hollow to harvest watercress that is dripping muddy water and filled with clinging little snails.
At dinner that night, the young storyteller refuses to eat the cleaned and delicious greens which the rest of her family relish. The watercress is more than food for her parents. It brings back memories of their childhood lives in China, stories of their own childhoods that they have never really shared with their AMERICAN children. In China, during a great famine the young narrator’s uncle died from starvation for lack of food as simple as fresh watercress. She realizes that the watercress triggers memories of great pain for her Chinese immigrant parents. She realizes that she is ashamed of being ashamed of her family. She samples the watercress and notes that this meal will become a new tradition for all of her family to treasure.
Chin’s watercolor artwork seamlessly moves from the contemporary Ohio farm country paintings to visions that are painful and tragic childhood happenings that frame the distant memories of the parents’ long-ago childhood lives in China before coming to America as immigrants.
The final notes written by the author and illustrator of Watercress are among the best end notes ever seen in a children’s picture book. Andrea Wang writes of the importance of immigrant parents sharing their own childhood memories with their children, no matter how harrowing they may have been. Some memories are so painful to recall that immigrant parents believe they should keep their own childhood memories hidden away. Wang, however, articulates her belief that if she had known more about the childhood lives her parents miraculously survived through war and famine, that she would have shown her parents greater empathy. No matter how terrible her parents’ early lives were, they are a part of her history. She notes that Watercress was written both as an apology and a love letter to her parents. She invites all readers to share their family stories. “Tell your stories. They are essential.” Stories create family traditions.
Chin explains why he chose watercolor as his medium since it is common to both Chinese and western art and why he used both Chinese and western paint brushes. He chose the colors of yellow ochre and cerulean blue that dominate Chinese art. Cover and interior images flow from one culture and one era to another. Corn stalks dominate the margins of the young storyteller’s vivid experience of wading into cold and dirty water to harvest life-sustaining watercress. Bamboo shoots are parallel borders to more somber scenes from the painful childhood of the author’s mother’s childhood in an ancient Chinese community. Even though Chin was born the grandchild of Chinese immigrants, he also writes about memories of being different, feeling out of place, and being perceived as foreign. He relates that his father, the child of Chinese immigrants to America, felt both adolescent anger and shame of his parents. He refused to eat Chinese food. He, too, was ashamed of his ancestry.
Both Andrea Wang and Jason Chin’s end notes provide crucial insights young creators may need to become writers and artists themselves.
Home and School Activities
Andrea Wang uses a seemingly undistinguished childhood memory to fashion a story that results in an exceptional family sharing of history. Her prose narrative reads like poetry. Encourage young readers to explore their own unique family origins. Perhaps their ancestors did not emigrate to the United States from another country, but they may have struggled against racism, ethnic prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, or simply being “different.” What family origin stories should gifted children know? How, for example, were their African-American heroic military ancestors treated by mainstream American culture once World War II was won? How can children weave the heritage and history of their ancestors into meaningful family traditions? Encourage children to write and illustrate a profile of a heroic ancestor. These tributes can be framed and displayed on a home wall of fame.
Watercress is a simple, nutritious, and free food in Andrea Wang’s story. Despite its humble beginnings, it is associated with life-saving food in the narrative. Encourage students to use online learning tools to find out more about this vegetable. How do chefs use watercress in their recipes? Other “free” edible plants and spices may include wild horseradish, wild asparagus, collards, dill, yucca, chokeberries (or chokecherries), collard greens, dill, and nasturtiums. What edible free plants can be used as spices or as salad greens? A caveat. Any food testing or use of wild plants in recipes must be accomplished with complete and total adult supervision. Many people search spring woodlands where mushrooms are often plentiful. However, some kinds of mushrooms can be poisonous, even deadly.
Alternatively, young readers can compose brief poems such as odes and haiku that celebrate a “weed” such as watercress that proves to be life-sustaining in Andrea Wang’s glorious picture book memoir.
Jason Chin is a remarkable author and illustrator who has won important awards for his books such as Grand Canyon and Your Place in the Universe, both of which he wrote and illustrated. Invite readers to locate copies of these two additional literary triumphs. His research into all of his books is phenomenal. Invite students to be Chin’s book agent or editor. What new subject would they like to see him explore and write about? One example might be spectacular and phenomenal volcanoes. Gifted children can research a subject of choice and then create a story board of the opening pages of the proposed new book. How might Jason Chin write for young people about the Kilauea and Mauna Loa Volcanoes in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park?
Atinuke. Africa, Amazing Africa: Country by Country. Illus. by Mouni Feddag. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2021. Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review).
