1926: SHEN OF THE SEA: CHINESE STORIES FOR CHILDREN by Arthur Bowie Chrisman, with illustrations by Else Hasselriis
"A shamelessly rainy day, my honorable Brother Chi." "That is truth, esteemed Brother Cha."
I think part of the reason we like folktales and fables is that they introduce us to the idea that if we're clever, we can get one over on the people who are bigger and stronger and more powerful than we are. The hare is always faster than the tortoise on paper, but the tortoise is smart enough to pace himself. The lion traps the mouse, but the mouse knows he can help the lion out with that thorn, and talks his way out of the trap. Brer Fox is bigger than Brer Rabbit, but Brer Rabbit knows how to use reverse psychology, and possibly race science, to escape back to the briar patch so he can, again, possibly dive deeper into studying race science (this is the least offensive image I could find of that particular film):
The point is that we tell these stories to children because we want to show them that even though there are scary things in the world that can hurt you, you can outwit them, or even win them over by being kind and conscientious. But that lesson isn't always true; it actually strikes me as being true an "almost never" percentage of the time. There really are scary people in this world that can hurt you, and in a lot of cases the kind of power they have - over your job, over your government, in the number of automatic weapons they keep in their home - isn't the kind of thing you can fully address by just outwitting someone. On top of that, there are also a lot of scary things in this world that can hurt you that you can't outwit, because they're not people, they're a contagious virus or a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf. But you have to tell your kids stories, and you don't want them worrying about the world when they're three years old. So you tell them "the scary things in the world can be overcome if you're clever enough", and it's a convenient lie you tell them so they don't have to worry, and they can continue learning how to be people, as you tell them other convenient lies like "we are governed under an effective system of representative democracy" or "I am an above-average driver".
I don't know if what I just described is exactly a universal experience of parenting, but at least fables and folktales about outsmarting and overcoming the scary things in the world do exist in every culture. For example, ancient China had them, and a dude from Arkansas wrote them all down in a book and won the fifth-ever Newbery medal for it.
1926 medalist Shen Of The Sea: Chinese Stories For Children could have been horrifying, and thankfully it's not. But I got really worried when I read the jacket copy on the 1953 printing, which is what my library had on the shelf:
"Arthur Chrisman spent several years studying the ancient literature and history of China. In his travels he made the acquaintance of a genial Chinese shopkeeper who could at times be persuaded to 'put on his talking cap' and thereby greatly enriched Mr. Chrisman's appreciation of Chinese customs and folk tales."
While I had some concerns that this book from 1925 - an era not exactly known for widespread respect for diversity and cultural heritage - would be a bunch of slapped-together stories that the author overheard from an old shopkeeper and padded out with, once again, race science, this collection is a very pleasant read and the stories are cute. Else Hasselriis' woodcut-style illustrations also help bring moments to life like the accidental invention of gunpowder ("BROOOOMP."):
Gunpowder is one of the Chinese inventions whose creation is described in these stories, along with chopsticks (king who didn't want people to stab him with forks), moveable type (annoying kid who spilled jam on a carved ivory block), and china flatware (king who needed loud plates to keep on the windowsill in case a dragon tried to sneak into the castle in the middle of the night). The book is good at what it does, and Chrisman - again, a dude from Arkansas retelling stories that a shopkeeper told him after putting on his “talking cap” - has made these stories, for lack of a better word, adorable.
A recurring theme across the stories is, again, the smaller but cleverer man getting one over on the king, or the invading army, or the dragon trying to eat him. "Four Generals", probably the strongest story in the book, tells the story of a king who gives military commands to four humble citizens - a busker, a tailor, a shepherd, and an archer - to repay favors from earlier in his life. When a massive army threatens to invade, the four new generals are able to overrun them with sheep, break their morale with sad music, quickly train expert archers to attack at range, and run a Three-Amigos-style scam to convince the invaders that the defending army is many times bigger than it is. You don't have to be afraid when the bigger army is at your gates, not if you have clever ideas and a little bit of heart. The bad guys will lose due to their own arrogance and ignorance.
It was kind of nice to see this apparently-universal theme in a critically acclaimed book about Chinese folk culture that came out in the 1920s. It was nice to read this book and see that this different culture had the same hopeful stories they told their children about how the good guys win and the bad guys don't. It was weird that it took a dude from Arkansas to collect and publish all of them (in this book and in two more books of Chinese folktales that Chrisman would write later in his career), but I assume it was easier for a dude from Arkansas to get published in 1925 than a Chinese-American author. Also, there weren't a lot of Chinese-American authors in 1925 because America had literally banned all Asian people from immigrating to the States just one year earlier.
Shen Of The Sea was published one year after the Immigration Act of 1924 effectively barred all Asian people from immigrating into the United States; this law was an expansion of the more infamous Chinese Exclusion Act and stayed on the books for almost three decades. When I described the mid-twenties as "an era not exactly known for strict respect for diversity and cultural heritage", I really meant "from a legal perspective, the literal worst time in American history when it came to how we treated Chinese people".
So I can read my daughters stories from China showing that the good guys win and the bad guys don't, that the scary and bad things in the world can be outsmarted and overcome, but the world that produced these stories worked nothing like the world in the stories themselves. These stories were collected and published during one of America's multiple "yellow peril" convulsions, during a backlash to recent immigration from Asia, during a time when the power of the state was used in service of bigotry and greed. And "power being used in service of bigotry and greed" is a story I see play out in the world a lot more often than "the scary and bad things in the world can be outsmarted and overcome".
Still, I can take comfort, and I can confidently tell my children, that almost a century after we banned all Asian immigrants from entering the country, we're in a much better place now, that we'd never blanket-ban an entire race or ethnicity or other group from entering the country out of bigotry and back it up with a Supreme Court ruling and the power of our brutal immigration enforcement apparatus, and that even if we did that, the people who came up with that blanket ban would certainly be sober-minded serious officials with decades of experience in government and the genuine best interests of others at heart, and definitely not a senile game show host doing what his television told him.
Well. You have to tell your kids stories, and you don't want them worrying about the world when they're three years old.
I don't want my kids to worry about the world; I worry enough for all of us combined. I don't sit down and tell my toddler "the world is a cruel place and we might be doomed". I read her stories and I try to show her that the world is bigger than she thinks and she's not alone in it. I also try to find stories for her about good people who did good things in the past, so she can grow up and be a better person herself.
And also shortly after my oldest kid was born I bought a copy of this book:
Sorry to be all "every nineties kid remembers this", but 1992's The Stinky Cheese Man And Other Fairly Stupid Tales would have been a staple in the second-grade library of every aspiring jackass in my generation. Jon Scieszka has written countless parody, pastiche, and generally irreverent books for young readers - his big thing is getting boys to read - and his frequent collaborator Lane Smith brings lunatic-asylum-collage-style work to illustrate most of Scieszka's words. Stinky Cheese Man represented the peak of their collaboration, and was nominated for a Caldecott medal, which is like the Newbery but for picture books.
As you can guess from the title, Stinky Cheese Man is a collection of parodies of popular fairy tales. The title story is a send-up of "The Gingerbread Man", about a little man made of cheese so stinky that nobody wants to chase him. "The Princess And The Bowling Ball" is like "The Princess And The Pea" except, well, the one thing.
But more importantly, Stinky Cheese Man was my first introduction - and, I assume, the first introduction of many readers, including my own children eventually - to meta-comedy. Stinky Cheese Man isn’t just a book with a lot of parodies of fairy tales, it’s also a parody of books. There are jokes about the endpaper, the title page, even the ISBN barcode on the back. The first story is a parody of Chicken Little, in which Chicken Little runs around screaming that the sky is falling because something hit him on the head. He gathers his group of fellow birds together, while the narrator - Jack, of Jack and the Beanstalk - tries to warn them about something that has gone awry with the book’s table of contents. It turned out that the table of contents was falling, and the story ends with the full table of contents falling out of the sky and killing all of the characters.
That is, perhaps, a little dark. But it was also the first time I had ever seen a book make a joke about its own table of contents. Jack is grabbed out of his own story later in the book. The Little Red Hen keeps popping up in the middle of things wondering when her chapter is going to start. Jack has to move the endpaper around to distract the giant so he thinks the book ends before it actually does. This is what the opening endpaper and title page look like:
Stinky Cheese Man was the first time I got to think about how a book was actually structured, and how stories overall were actually structured, and how you could pull them apart and look at each of the pieces and slap big labels on them and put them in the wrong places and laugh at them. It was one of several key books I read as a child that gave me the idea that the things we thought were fixed and sacred were things we could play with and change. It was true about the stories we heard and the very books we read, and if it was true about those things, it can be true about other things that we assumed could never change, like who gets to tell us what to do, and what vulnerable people have to endure.
You have to tell your kids stories, and you don't want them worrying about the world when they're three years old. And you can tell them the folktales about the good guys winning and the bad guys losing, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But stories like that are rarely how real life works. So I make sure to read my daughters absurdist stories by Jon Scieszka, and Daniel Pinkwater and Jules Feiffer and many other authors from my childhood who were not scared to show us that sometimes the world just doesn’t make sense, sometimes things do not play out like the stories told us they would, but there's hope for us if we’re willing to think in radically different ways.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1988 medalist, Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman.