Book Reviews by Carol Neeland for LS 5603: Literature for Children and Young Adults

Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China by Ai-Ling Louie, illustrated by Ed YoungPlot Summary:Yeh-Shen’s father has two wives. Yeh-Shen’s mother dies suddenly and her father dies soon after, leaving Yeh-Shen with her stepmother and stepsister. The stepmother hates Yeh-Shen and is jealous because Yeh-Shen is more beautiful than her own daughter. They give Yeh-Shen the heaviest chores to do and dress her in rags. Yeh-Shen’s only joy is a fish that lives in the pond. Yeh-Shen shares what little food she has with the fish and talks to it everyday. When her stepmother learns of Yeh-Shen’s friendship with the fish, she goes to the pond and kills it. Yeh-Shen is heartbroken when she discovers that her friend is gone but she doesn’t realize that it was her stepmother’s doing until her tears fall into the pond and an old man mysteriously appears to tell her that Yeh-Shen must collect the bones of the fish. The bones have magic powers to bring Yeh-Shen her heart’s desire. Yeh-Shen often talks to the bones and occasionally asks for food. When the spring festival comes, Yeh-Shen wishes for clothes to wear and receives lovely clothes and jeweled shoes. She was warned not to lose the shoes, but she accidentally drops one while rushing home from the festival, which causes the bones to lose their magic. A king ends up with the lost shoe and searches for the owner. When he finds Yeh-Shen, he asks her to marry him.

As in all folktales, the characters are representative of good and evil – Yeh-Shen and the king are good and the stepmother are evil. Justice prevails; the stepmother and stepdaughter are punished, first by not being allowed to visit Yeh-Shen at her new home and then by being crushed to death in a shower of stones inside the cave where they live. 

The language of the book is magnificent. Instead of “Once upon a time” the book starts like this, “In the dim past, even before the Ch’in and the Han dynasties, there lived a cave chief of southern China by the name of Wu.” Using the word “dim” not only evokes thoughts of a hazy time in the past, it helps describe the physical setting of the cave. In another lovely passage Yeh-Shen is described as having “skin as smooth as ivory and dark pools for eyes.” The language is descriptive, yet still accessible to children. 

Another interesting feature is that the original version of the story is written in Chinese characters in the front of the book. I asked one of my colleagues if it was a good translation and she said that the details are the same, but some things are described differently. 

The illustrations are also remarkable. My son pointed out that there is a picture of a fish on every page. The fish represents Yeh-Shen’s only friend. Even the dancers at the spring festival are drawn with fish tail dresses. When the ladies are whispering about Yeh-Shen and asking each other who the beautiful girl is, the scene is drawn on a fish and the fish’s eye is the head of Yeh-Shen’s stepmother. The fish pictures are the background, not part of the action. They give the reader the sense that the fish is looking out for Yeh-Shen, no matter what happens. At the end of the book, after Yeh-Shen’s festival clothing is magically restored, the clothing is drawn like a fish cloak that covers her body, protecting her always.  

Yeh-Shen strikes me as more admirable and selfless than the traditional European Cinderella. Unlike the Cinderella that I grew up with, Yeh-Shen is more interested in getting the shoe back so that the fish bones will talk to her and their friendship can be renewed than she is in finding a husband, true love, and saving herself from the cruelty of her stepmother.. Another interesting difference between Yeh-Shen and the European Cinderella story is that the king first falls in love with Yeh-Shen’s shoes, not the girl herself. “He was entranced by the tiny thing, which was shaped of the most precious of metals, yet which made no sound when touched to stone.” For thousands of years in
China, tiny feet were considered a mark of beauty in a woman, so much so that girls’ feet were crushed and bound so that they would not grow. There are several mentions of tiny feet in the story: 

“…watch and wait for a woman with tiny feet to come and claim her slipper.”“…the girl in rags examined the tiny shoe.”“…he took a closer look at noticed that she walked upon the tiniest feet he had ever seen.” 

Clearly, Yeh-Shen’s tiny feet had as much to do with her attracting the king as the loveliness of her face! The European Cinderella stories, of course, utilize the glass slipper to find Cinderella. However, the focus is not on how small the slipper is, but how lovely. Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China is a rich story in its own right, but it also offers many intriguing points of comparison with other Cinderella stories. 

Review Excerpt: 

I was unable to find a reliable source for a review of Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China. There are many reviews online from people like me, especially on Amazon.com. However, in my search I was able to find a review of a historical novel that is based on Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China: 

“Even more realistic than East is Donna Jo Napoli’s Bound (Atheneum, 2004), a retelling of the tale of Yeh-Shen, the “Chinese Cinderella.” Written as historical fiction with almost no magical elements, the story takes place in a northern Chinese village during the late 1300s. After the death of her mother and father, Xing Xing is bound by tradition to live with her stepmother and stepsister, who treat her as a servant. Against Stepmother’s wishes, she attends a festival disguised in beautiful clothes her mother had hidden away for her; when Stepmother begins to recognize her, Xing Xing flees, dropping one of her tiny golden slippers. The slipper soon belongs to the local prince, who searches for the beautiful woman reputed to have left it behind. The prince finds Xing Xing, becomes entranced with her, and decides to marry her immediately. In all these particulars, the novel resembles both “Yeh-Shen” and many European versions of “Cinderella.” Napoli goes on to add details not found in the Chinese or European versions, but that are suggested instead by the novel’s setting and period. In another of the many meanings of the book’s title, the stepsister is mutilated by the practice of foot binding to keep her feet small and thus attractive to men. Xing Xing undertakes a dangerous journey to find medicine for her stepsister’s terribly infected feet; along the way she develops the self-reliance needed to face the prince with courage, a quality that enchants him as much as her beauty. The conclusion may seem a bit less than romantic for Western readers, but is in perfect keeping with this retelling’s cultural trappings. Like the other excellent retellings noted above, Bound offers readers unexpected details within a well-known framework, blending the familiar and the original into a compelling story reminiscent of, but not bound by, its traditional source.”

Bound sounds like a fascinating novel and reading this review made me want to locate a copy for additional comparisons with the other Cinderella stories. 

Connections: 

We are in the middle of Spring Festival here in China, an event that will end with the Lantern festival next week. Spring Festival is also known as Chinese New Year and we have just entered the year of the rat. Indeed, missing out on the Spring Festival festivities would have been heartbreaking for Yeh-Shen. It is the time of year when family is most important and Yeh-Shen’s sadness would have been compounded by missing her own family in addition to missing the festival. 

Ironically, Spring Festival usually comes at the coldest time of the year. The Chinese say that it is the time when they look for new growth, new beginnings, and for love to start. This year, which is the coldest in 50 years in China, people who were traveling home for the Spring Festival were stuck in trains and buses and stations all over China because of the snow and ice. For most people, this is the only time of year that they have a holiday; they are off for 1 – 4 weeks. Sadly, burglary and theft are more common just before Chinese New Year than at any other time because people are desperate to have money to give to their families at this time of year. Yeh-Shen wasn’t alone in wanting new clothes for the New Year. 

It occurred to me while I was reading that the descriptions of Yeh-Shen’s family as cavewomen and cavemen that they might be misconstrued by people living outside of China. When I was growing up I thought as cavemen as people who wrote on walls, hit animals with clubs, and said, “Ouga ouga.” But even now, thousands people are still living in caves in parts of China. Last spring we visited a family that lives in a cave outside of Xi’an. I’ve attached pictures below so you can see that the caves are not as primitive as you might imagine. They are warm in winter and cool in summer and are very effective protection against dust storms which are common in that part of China. 

If I were teaching a fairy tale unit to a class, I would have the students create a Venn diagram using Kidspiration or Inspiration to show the similarities and differences between this story and the traditional European story. According to what I have read, Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China predates the European Cinderella and was possibly the inspiration for the European story. This would be interesting information for children who assume that their story is the “right” one. Having a Venn diagram to make the comparison would be wonderful evidence of just how much the stories have in common. 

Bibliographic Data:

Louie, Ai-Ling, and Ed Young. Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China.New York: PaperStar, 1982.

ISBN Number: 978-0399209000

Wright, Beth. “Once Upon a Time: A librarian looks at recent young adult novels based on fairy tales.” School Library Journal (2004), http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA482572.html?industryid=47087&q=Yeh%2DShen (accessed February 16, 2008).

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