The Asian Reporter's
BOOK REVIEWS

From The Asian Reporter, V16, #14 (April 4, 2006), page 16.

Shanghai Messenger

By Andrea Cheng

With drawings by Ed Young

Lee & Low Books, 2005

Hardcover, 38 pages, $17.95

By Josephine Bridges

Xiao Mei is rinsing rice when her Grandma Nai Nai announces that the 11-year-old girl has been invited to visit family in Shanghai. It’s Xiao Mei’s decision, says Nai Nai, but it’s not an easy one for the girl looking at her reflection in the rice water, wondering if people will stare at her eyes "with green flecks / like Dad’s" or if no one will come to meet her plane. "What if I am all alone / in China?"

It’s Nai Nai’s reminiscences about her brothers and sisters that make Xiao Mei’s decision, but the girl is still concerned. What if she forgets which relative is which? "No matter," her grandmother reassures her, "they are all / Auntie and Uncle / to you."

Andrea Cheng doesn’t skirt the difficulties of travel — shots, jet lag, illness — and she doesn’t skimp on the strange joys either. Doing tai chi in a small park in the early morning, Xiao Mei smells "mist / and gasoline / and fish." A girl in an art class she visits tries to give her a picture she has drawn. "I cannot take / her beautiful bird. / She doesn’t know me / at all." Cousin Jing describes re-education as the two watch shirts go around in the dryer that seems like a miracle in weather so wet that clothes won’t dry on the balcony: "We cannot study, / only work / in the fields. / Waste eight years, / not enough food, / yams every day, / and mud / on the floors." And the night before her return flight, Xiao Mei listens to farmers shouting outside her window and realizes, "Soon I won’t / hear them / anymore."

Shanghai Messenger is a gorgeous book in every way possible. Andrea Cheng’s narrative is spare and evocative and you want it never to be over. Shanghai native Ed Young’s masterful illustrations prod the imagination ever so gently. Even the font used for section titles and first letters is unforgettable with its extraordinary letter "A."

Sure, people stare at the "half Chinese / half not" girl on the streets of Shanghai just as they do in her hometown, but when Xiao Mei helps a little boy climb on a park bench "because in China it’s okay / even if he’s not your brother, / even if you never saw him before," the reader senses what a great big world it is and yet how at home in it this little girl can feel.