Book Review: Little White Duck: A Childhood in China
For my book review I chose the book Little White Duck: A Childhood in China by Na Liu and Andres Vera Martinez. When choosing a book I decided to search for books in China. I think the Chinese culture is one of the most noticeable ones in the United States so I thought it would be a good place to read from. Personally I don’t know much about the Chinese culture and reading books that can broaden my knowledge is always ideal.
To start out before I read Little White Duck I didn’t know it was a graphic novel. I also didn’t know we would be talking about graphic novels in this class either. I’m glad I learned about graphic novels before writing this review. I think it adds in how I can talk about it having spent a for weeks learning about a graphic novel. Graphic novel is another thing I didn’t have prior knowledge about. I think Little White Duck is my favorite graphic novel I have read this semester. A graphic novel is written with words and pictures in panels. Little White Duck has a lot of variety when it comes to the lengths of the different panels. Some are really big and some are smaller in size. I think for this story it’s important to know how to read a graphic novel because sometimes the layout of the panels and words can cause confusion of what to read in what order. I would say the pictures in this novel are very important. The majority of the pages are pictures and the words take up very little amount of space. Another thing is this graphic novel has more pages that one panel takes up the whole page than the other graphic novels we have read. Some pages have a lot going on and other has not as much. I personally like the variety of panels and amount of things on a page because it adds an extra element of entertainment. Just as The Arrival Little White Duck’s illustrations really focus on details and invites me into the story.
Little White Duck is a story about a young Chinese girl and her family. In a story you get the Chinese culture in multiple ways. One way the culture is presented is by the images. The art is very Chinese like. Another thing is Chinese writing is seen in the book and Chinese specific words are used. It’s helpful that their is a glossary for these words because a lot I didn’t’ know what they meant as I read. You can sort of figure the meanings out by the context but it’s nice that the glossary is there to confirm what you thought and to help you out if the context wasn’t enough. The story talks about the way of life for Chinese people like only one kid can go to school and the law of only one children per family. (Andres 16). Throughout the story you get multiple ways of life for Chinese people and you can see daily lives and struggles. You get things like the four pest, Lei Feng Day, working in the fields. One thing that made me feel connected to the story was when the mother wanted them to eat their food so she told them struggles of people that had to starve. ( Andres 39) This reminded me of something my mom would do so I feel like it was the way see that even though we’re different we can still have similarities. Another way culture is seen is the story of Nian the Monster. Stories like that are so culture rooted that it allows outsiders inside the culture to explore things that aren’t known automatically. I think Little White Duck is a good story to learn about the Chinese culture and some of it’s ways of life and values. The story shows foods even. It’s a whole well rounded look of the culture as a whole.
The book is written by Andres who is the husband of Na Liu and together they made this book. I found it so interesting that the stories in the book were based of Na Liu real life experiences. I think that makes the book more accurate and creditable. It’s coming from a source that has been through everything written about it’s not made up.
My favorite part of the novel is when she goes to visit her grandmother with her father and her cousins aren’t used to nice things so they get her white duck on her coat all dirty. I would probably be mad if that happened to me but Da Qin response was so mature, “I wanted to let them touch my coat, but at the same time, I didn’t want them to get it dirty.” (Andres 98). She wanted them to get to experience something nice like that but she also didn’t want to get dirty.
Overall I would highly recommend Little White Duck. It’s an interesting story that shows aspects of the Chinese culture. It also being a graphic novel gives it some diversity. This book would be good for Chinese kids as well as people that aren’t Chinese. It’s good to learn about the culture and way of life and good for other Chinese kids to relate to it.
Words Cited
Na Liu, Andres Vera Martinez. Little White Duck: A Childhood in China. Graphic Universe, 2012.