A New Year’s Reunion
By Yu Li-Qiong
Illustrated by Zhu Cheng-Liang
This realistic fiction picture books illustrates a contemporary lifestyle that is supposedly nontraditional yet common for many families in China where family members live apart due to job conditions and meet one or two times a year during national holidays. New Year’s Day, as a national family event, holds for its participants a special gratitude for the reunion of family in addition to the excitement of celebrating a tradition in China. Layers of meaningful joy during this holiday week are portrayed through a young girl, Maomao, and her family and their memorable four days of the New Year.
Maomao lives with her mother because her father works in a construction job that is far away and so he can only come home once a year during the New Year’s celebration. On the first morning of New Years Day, Maomao’s family gets up early and makes sticky rice balls. One of the balls is the lucky one with a hidden coin. Maomao’s mom cooks and serves “piping-hot sticky rice balls” and Maomao bites into the fortune coin ball. Maomao puts the coin away in her pocket for safe-keeping and heads to New Year visits.
On the second day, Maomao’s father repairs their house because he cannot help his family while he is gone the rest of year. Maomao joins her father and has a great time with her dad on the house roof.
On the third day, it snows “really hard!” and Maomao’s neighborhood friends have a snow fight and make a snowman. When she comes home late, Maomao finds that her fortune coin is gone. Even though she goes back to the courtyard searching for her coin, she has no success. Maomao’s disappointing night is eventually saved when the lucky coin is found.
The following morning, her father packs to leave and Maomao gives her fortune coin to her father saying, “Here, take this. Next time you’re back, we can bury it in the sticky rice ball again!”
This book invites readers into the context of New Year’s Day to rethink the meaning of a traditional holiday that has evolved to meet social and economic needs while fulfilling its traditional role. The family tie is the priority rather than celebratory performances like dragon dances and firecrackers.
Although the New Year’s Day is the focus of the story, the themes are family love, patience, and growing up through experience. In the end, Maomao finds her coin and gives it to her father asking him to bring it back for the next New Year’s. This insight speaks in a contemporary voice about the significance of New Year’s Day and perhaps is an indication of social issues in the widening gap between the rich and poor in China.
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