In prepa­ra­tion for an upcom­ing trip, I’ve been enjoy­ing many books about Chi­nese his­tory, cul­ture and folk­lore. This is just a sam­pling that fits in with the Non-Fiction Pic­ture Book Chal­lenge, but please leave sug­ges­tions for oth­ers in the comments!

Mao and Me is a beau­ti­ful auto­bi­og­ra­phy by Chen Liang Hong (author/illustrator of Lit­tle Eagle and The Magic Horse of Han Gan). It is not a com­fort­able book as it por­trays his child­hood dur­ing a very tur­bu­lent period. Grow­ing up dur­ing the Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion, Chen expe­ri­enced grief and hard­ship of his father being sent away for reed­u­ca­tion as well as pride when becom­ing a Lit­tle Red Guard. Details of fam­ily life such as his grandmother’s cook­ing, his grandfather’s bird and his sis­ters efforts to earn candy money, all accom­pa­nied by his beau­ti­ful art­work, make clear that he grew up in a world both drab and beau­ti­ful. The book ends rather abruptly after Mao’s death and his father’s return. While it is filled with sor­row, it is also a much more opti­mistic por­trayal of the Cul­tural Rev­o­lu­tion through a child’s eyes than I expected.

I highly rec­om­mend D is for Doufu: An Alpha­bet of Chi­nese Cul­ture by May­wan Shen Krach and illus­trated by Hong­bin Zhang. This is an incred­i­bly rich alpha­bet book intro­duc­ing 23 Chi­nese words and phrases with their inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal and cul­tural mean­ings. I really appre­ci­ated the expla­na­tions for the pic­tographs and cross-references when pic­tographs reap­peared in later words and phrases. These con­nec­tions had me fre­quently flip­ping back and forth between the entries for a deeper under­stand­ing of previously-read words and phrases.

The last three are folk­lore, but since my library shelves folk­lore in the non­fic­tion sec­tion, I am going to include them in the non­fic­tion pic­ture book chal­lenge. Da Wei’s Trea­sure by Mar­garet and Ray­mond Chang cap­tures Da Wei’s jour­ney fol­low­ing the trea­sured mountain-shaped rock his father received from a fish­er­man. Many inter­est­ing adven­tures ensue, most notably when he enters an under­sea palace and exits with a kit­ten. In true folk­loric tra­di­tion, its roots in Pu Songling’s tales were adapted by Ray­mond Chang’s own mother to include a wife a s a tran­formed cat.

The Jade Stone by Caryn Yacowitz and illus­trated by Ju-Hong Chen is a tale of lis­ten­ing to one’s inner cre­ative voice. Again, an artist has been com­manded by the emperor to cre­ate some­thing. This time Chan Lo must cre­ate a dragon of wind and fire from a beau­ti­ful piece of jade. But this is not the image that speaks to the stone carver. Bravely Chan Lo forges ahead and carves the jade carp that glide through his dreams.

The Cricket’s Cage by Ste­fan Czer­necki is a delight­ful tale of a car­pen­ter fac­ing pun­ish­ment when he can­not cre­ate an design for the For­bid­den City that sat­is­fies the emperor. A cricket inad­ver­tently aids the car­pen­ter when he draws a design for the new cage he has been promised. The tale reminded me of Mas­ter­piece by Elise Broach and I am now very curi­ous whether Broach is fami­lar with this folktale.

Today’s Non­fic­tion Mon­day roundup is hosted by Rasco from RIF.