When I read this book to my daughter, the moment the theatre usher says to Viola  “You people have to sit in the upstairs section,”  she sensed something was wrong, but had trouble articulating it.   Finally, she said “It’s racism, isn’t it?”  stumbling a little over the R-word.  She could hardly believe that Viola had to go to jail and be fined twenty dollars (which at the time would have been a significant amount to pay,) for not going upstairs to the balcony.   As obvious as the racist treatment was in the situation, the word ‘racism’ somehow just didn’t seem to come up in the text or in the story — it was like the white elephant in the room.  Racial segregation, did in fact, exist in Nova Scotia, but no one wanted to acknowledge it in this situation but Viola herself, by refusing to budge.  And that was what made her rather singular much like Rosa Parks in the U.S.

This is a story Canadians need to know about themselves.  I’m glad to have read it to my daughter whose eyes were opened to the history and experience of black Canadians in Nova Scotia.

It was the third night of Hannukkah and young Isaac Schnitzer was doing his homework when there was a loud crash in his bedroom: someone had thrown a rock through the window at the menorah that had been shining out into the darkness.

Isaac was stunned when he found out that rock had been thrown because he was Jewish, one incident in a spate of racist and anti-semitic attacks in the town. At this point, this crime could simply have become another statistic, with Isaac and his family picking up the pieces and carrying on. This did indeed happen: Isaac’s parents talked to him about not allowing bullies to stop them celebrating their holiday and that is what they resolved to do. However, this event was also the catalyst for a community-wide reaction to the intolerance. A town meeting was held and a woman called Margaret MacDonald, inspired by the King of Denmark and others wearing the yellow star of David during the second world war so that the Nazis would not be able to distinguish who was Jewish quite so easily, suggested that everyone put a menorah in their window.

At school, Isaac explained the meaning of Hannukah and the menorah to his classmates. The story follows one of them, Theresa, home and narrates the discussions she had with her family, and the huge picture of the menorah they put in their window with a greeting to Isaac and his family, along with a Jewish star and a Christian cross. Indeed, more and more menorahs appeared in windows as the days went by; and in the town of Billings, the acts of hatred gradually came to stop.

This is a great book for raising issues with children not just of tolerance but of what can be achieved when people stand together against bullies and bigots. It takes time and it takes courage but as the people of Billings said, ridding their town of these acts of hatred “was a gift they had given themselves. And [...] it was their best holiday gift, ever.” The events in Billings have inspired many people over the years – and author Janice Cohn has also written a play based on the story, Paper Candles; as well as this article. For further exploration of kidlit resources promoting respect for religious diversity, head on over to our current issue of PaperTigers, where you will also find these reading lists and links to other articles.

By Rukhsana Khan:

When we first came to Canada from Pakistan in 1965, not only were we children bullied at school but my father, a tool and die maker, was bullied at work. Some of his fellow workers wouldn’t call him by name, they’d call him ‘black bastard’, and he put up with it because he had a wife and four children to feed. When we first arrived, he was making about $7 an hour. That doesn’t sound like much now but back then it was good money. However, within a year of buying our house in Dundas, Ontario, and my little sister and brother being born, he got laid off. He ended up accepting another job for $2.35 an hour. At the end of the month, after paying the bills, we had about five dollars a week with which to buy food; most of the time we ate dill weed and potatoes because it was cheap and filling.

We were the only Pakistani Muslim family in Dundas. The other kids in my class didn’t know much about brown people. When I was in elementary school the other children would tell me and my sisters that they were white because they were clean and we were brown because we were dirty. They said that if we went home and took a lot of baths we’d get white like them. So we tried it. We took five baths a day for about two weeks. When that didn’t work, we tried baby powder and finally, we stopped drinking chocolate milk for a while.

When I got to middle school things got so much worse. Suddenly it really mattered what clothes you wore, and back then it had to be jeans. I didn’t even ask my parents to buy them for me; I knew they couldn’t afford them. Instead I asked for some men’s polyester work pants I saw in the Sears catalogue. I figured they looked like jeans, they just didn’t cost that much. This attempt at trying to fit in was worse than if I hadn’t bothered but I didn’t know it at the time. Also, at school I often spoke out – a big mistake. I was always lucky to have some very supportive teachers, and stupidly I took to heart their encouragement to share my opinions and did so freely. I had very poor social skills. I read tons of books and in the books the kids who were outsiders and very different were eventually seen to possess extraordinary qualities and were valued – kind of like Cinderella. I don’t know what I was thinking, offering opinions and sticking my neck out when everyone else in the class tested the waters to make sure their words jived with the consensus before committing themselves to an opinion. That, coupled with the awkward way I dressed and my skin colour, really set me apart and made me a target for bullies.

Two of the most notorious of my bullies in grade seven and eight were the most popular boys in the school named John and Rick. John was very handsome. Rick was ugly but he had a very nice body so he was popular too. They formed the hub of the ‘in’ crowd. I desperately wanted to be friends with them. I thought I belonged with them. They were smart, witty and cool, and I thought they’d like me once they got to know me. There were other kids in the class I could have befriended but I thought they were losers and would only drag me down. There was one girl in particular, with very big breasts and bad acne. She was friendly enough, but I avoided her. John and Rick called her Betty Big Boobs when she wasn’t around. I never called her that: but I didn’t say anything to stop them either. I thought it was her problem and I had my own problems to deal with.

One day Betty didn’t come to school. I thought maybe she was sick but then the rumour went around that she’d tried to kill herself, and I felt horribly guilty for not having had the guts to stick up for her when they were calling her those names. I really thought I had the most miserable life in all the school; I never imagined someone else could have had it bad enough to consider suicide too. I vowed I’d make it up to Betty. I’d be really nice to her when she returned.

My teacher had to go to the office for something and as soon as he left, Rick got up and made an announcement. He sounded very official. He said, “Class, it’s come to our attention that our dear Betty has tried to end it all. We will now have a two-minute silence for our dear Betty.” And then John and Rick and all the bimbo girls around them started snickering and giggling through their own two-minute silence. I couldn’t believe it. Why didn’t someone say something? All the other losers just sat looking around at each other. Nobody said a word for that poor girl. I thought, “Why don’t I say something?” And then I thought, “I can’t! If I do, they’ll just jump on me. She’s not even here.” And I thought, “Just wait till Betty gets back. I’ll be her friend.”And I looked at John and Rick and I thought, “I don’t want to be your friend any more. I don’t even want you to like me, because if you like me, then maybe I’m like you in some way, and I don’t want to be like you.” I thought, “You go your way and I’ll go mine.”

Betty never did show up for school. And John and Rick and those bimbo girls ended up going to a different high school. It always bothered me that I hadn’t had the guts to say anything to them. And so I wrote my novel Dahling, If You Luv Me, Would You Please, Please Smile to kind of atone for that act of cowardice.

Laura says on her blog of the “Writers Against Racism” series: “The questions and answers reveal how the personal and the political are intimately linked. Each person has their own experiences, their own stories to tell—and all of us have connected to and through literature as a way of combating racism.” I can’t imagine a more effective weapon than literature in this worthwhile battle. Can you?

As part of their celebrations for Asian American Heritage Month, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association announced the winner and honor books in the 2009 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature. These awards promote Asian/Pacific American culture and heritage based on literary and artistic merit, and our congratulations go out to Wabi Sabi, written by Mark Reibstein and illustrated by Ed Young, which won the picture book award. Back in 2008, PaperTiger bloggers Marj and Aline were thrilled to see the proofs for Wabi Sabi at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and Marj posted a great review of Wabi Sabi here.

Winners have also been announced in the Growing Up Asian in America Art and Essay contest, which is open to students in grades K – 12 who reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. This year’s theme was “Change- If you could change one thing to make the world a better place, what would that be?”. I was especially drawn to Claire Dworsky’s essay entitled Change Your Assumptions, in which she wrote:

To me, growing up Asian is the same as any kid most of the time. I go to school, gymnastics, soccer, play with my dog, play outside – normal stuff.

But sometimes other people say things that make me feel sad or different. They make fun of my eyes and call me Chinese. They yell, “Hey Chinois!” They ask questions that aren’t really questions, like “Are you really adopted?” I say “Yes I was adopted from Kayakhstan, a country between Russia and China. I can show you on a map if you want.” But they’re really using these questions to make fun of me. And it’s even worse. When Asian girls pick on me by saying “Oh, you have blue eyes you think you are all that.” Racism is hurtful, no matter who says it.

Claire concludes her essay with a powerful statement that all of us, young and old, should take to heart: “When you know how it feels to be discriminated against you should use that feeling to imagine how others feel, and change yourself so you can help others.” The winning entries of the Growing Up Asian in America contest will be on exhibit at several locations throughout the Bay Area until February 2010. Click here to see the schedule.

A book I have read again recently to my children is Milly Lee’s Nim and the War Effort, illustrated by Yangsook Choi (Sunburst/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). Set in San Francisco during the Second World War, it tells the story of Nim, a little girl who is intent on beating her arch enemy, Garland Stephenson, an unprincipled bully, from winning the school drive to collect old newspapers “for the war effort”. She strikes lucky when she is offered a garage piled high with bundles of newspapers and resourcefully calls the police to help her to get them to the school in time…

Nim’s rather strict upbringing is ostensibly unaffected by the fact that the Second World War is going on – but it pervades her life nevertheless. Her grandfather wears a lapel pin of crossed American and Chinese flags; and she is fully aware of what certain symbols around her mean – like a gold star on a white background in a front window, to show that “the family who lived there had lost someone in the war”. At the same time, their deeper significance is perhaps lost on her. She is too young to understand that the lapel pin is there to protect her family from the prejudice against Americans of Japanese ethnicity at that time; nor what the emotional impact of losing a loved one in a war overseas actually means. However, it is also these details that give the story a depth and a historical validity: and indeed, in an interview with PaperTigers, Milly Lee told us that, apart from slightly changing her rival’s name, this is a true story. Her grandfather received several phone-calls telling him that his grand-daughter was in the back of a police car, which must have caused more than a little concern, but for Milly:

Oh yes, the ride in the police paddy wagon was wonderful, exhilarating, jubilant, a thrill, and probably the best ride I’ve ever had – and I’ve been on many different kinds of rides since then: yak, elephant, dogsled, tundra-buggy, rafts, and camel!

I can just imagine! And I particularly like the ending, where Grandfather reminds Nim to “Be gracious in your moment of triumph” – and she places her last newspaper on Garland’s stack then “looked over her shoulder and flashed Grandfather an impish grin” – feisty!

This is a beautifully crafted story – and a beautifully illustrated one – which not only leaves young listeners cheering that Nim won the day but gives much pause for thought about racial prejudice and bullying.