Category Archives: Classics

Annals of the Inexplicable: The Five Chinese Brothers

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The Five Chinese BrothersI have no problem with a politically incorrect classic. Babar may be a colonialist, but he’s dear to my heart. And the only thing stopping me from buying my own copy of Richard Scarry’s original Busy, Busy World (1965) — starring the garrulous Patrick Pig from Ireland and the Israeli wife who wouldn’t stop nagging her husband — is that an unexpurgated edition can cost upwards of $300.

I remember sitting on a rug with the rest of my kindergarden class enthralled by the strange, dark folk tale of five brothers who manage to outwit the authorities when one of the siblings is wrongly sentenced to death. The Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop (1938) may have depicted my fellow Asians as vengeful and slanty-eyed but that didn’t rattle me. The brothers had alluring superhuman abilities: “The First Chinese Brother could swallow the sea. The Second Chinese Brother had an iron neck. The Third Chinese Brother could stretch and stretch his legs. The Fourth Chinese Brother could not be burned. And the Fifth Chinese Brother could hold his breath indefinitely.”

But on re-reading this book here’s what you realize. The Five Chinese Brothers is absolutely baffling. I still don’t have a huge problem with it being un-P.C. It’s more that it inevitably raises some questions, such as:

1) “How could you kill someone with whipped cream?”

Oven Stuffed With Whipped CreamTo a kid, being plopped into a container of whipped cream sounds like heaven. Besides that, when the oven is turned on wouldn’t the fluffy cream turn to liquid? (Not to mention my own question — when were the ancient Chinese even eating whipped cream?)

 2) “Why were the people so angry each time a Chinese Brother didn’t die?”

Burning PunishmentHard to answer without getting involved in a discussion of mob psychology and the public thirst for bloody spectacles.

3) “How come if they couldn’t kill the Brother that meant he was innocent?”

Brothers-MotherThis is biggest doozy of them all. When all the executions fail, the judge decides it means that their prisoner must not be guilty! Truly, it is beyond all logic.

My kids liked The Five Chinese Brothers well enough, but it didn’t seem to make much of an impression either way. In fact, my daughter has since discovered Kathy Tucker’s The Seven Chinese Sisters (2003), which she likes much more. The book (with illustrations by Grace Lin) is also about a Chinese family with preternatural powers, but it’s not a watered-down retelling of the Five Chinese Brothers. The story involves a dragon, a kidnapping, and a noodle soup. Check it out. 

SevenChineseSisters

4 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Richard Scarry

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Retan-RisomI’ve been reading The Busy, Busy World of Richard Scarry (1997) by Walter Retan, Scarry’s longtime editor at Random House and Golden Press. I’ve always loved the way Scarry was able to cram so many little details onto a page and explain complicated real-world things (like the workings of a paper factory), with such precision. But who knew he lived such a glittering life? (At one point, says Retan: “They were weary of the constant parties, the steady flow of house guests, the drinking and the endless interruptions.”) Or that his books made such gazillions? (Think: foreign editions.) I learned a few other things as well…

1) There’s a reason Lowly Worm wore a Tyrolean hat.  Scarry was a Boston-born, Brothers-wearing, New England preppy but moved permanently to Switzerland with his wife and young son in 1968. This also explains why Huckle Cat wears those leiderhosen. Lowly

2) He was fired from Vogue after three weeks. After serving in WWII Scarry got a job in the art department of Vogue. When they told him that he wasn’t right for the position, he asked them why they had hired him in the first place. The HR person explained that they had been impressed by his white suit and blue shirt. (Scarry was a very stylish dresser.)vogue-november-1946

3) He married Peggy from Mad Men! Not really, but when Scarry met his chic wife-to-be, Patsy Murphy, in 1948, she was working as a copywriter at Young & Rubicam. She later went on to write books with Scarry, but for a time she helped support the couple with her work at the agency.

Newlyweds Dick and Patsy Scarry

4) These are his granddaughters, Olympia and Fiona Scarry. Readers of Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, and WWD know the Swiss socialites by their regular party page appearances. Olympia is an installation artist who has worked for Matthew Barney and wears a lot of YSL and Haider Ackermann. (You can check out her recent appearance in Interview magazine here.)

Olympia and Fiona Scarry at Cannes 2012 Vanity Fair/Gucci party

The List: Maira Kalman’s Favorite Children’s Books

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The book that singlehandedly reignited my interest in kids’ books long after I had lost all my baby teeth was Maira Kalman’s Max Makes a Million, about a New York City dog who dreams of moving to Paris to become a poet.  I wasn’t exactly the book’s target audience when my mom bought it for me (I was in college) but no matter. I loved everything about it, from the illustrations reminiscent of Marc Chagall to the urbane vision of a Manhattan populated by artists who paint invisible paintings and architects who design upside down houses. I’ve since interviewed Maira a few times (here’s my story for W magazine) and she recently sat down with me to kick off a new feature where I’ll be asking authors and illustrators to name the kids’ books that have meant the most to them.

So herewith …

Maira Kalman’s Favorite Children’s Books 

1) Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

“I loved reading it to my kids when they were little. It’s beautifully written, philosophical, and funny.”

2) Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

“Probably the greatest children’s book ever written, and also a complicated book about mathematics, language and logic. Did the kids like it when I read it to them? I don’t know. It was more like, “You go to sleep, I’ll read Alice in Wonderland.”

3) William Steig’s books

“So lyrical and almost Proustian. The Amazing Bone is probably the one I read the most often. The only Steig books I really wasn’t a big fan of were Rotten Island and Shrek.”

4)  Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

“It was such an amazing experience for me to read about this heroic, intrepid girl who wasn’t afraid of anything.”

5) The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Growing up in the Bronx, I was astonished that people lived in this kind of splendor. Ever since then I have adored British castles and gardens.”

6) The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

“I didn’t read it growing up. But as with all my favorite children’s books it’s very funny, with a certain sophistication.”

7) The Philharmonic Gets Dressed by Marc Simont

“A fantastic book from the 1960s that follows musicians through the process of getting ready for a performance. It has such a sense of both groundedness and giddiness.”

8) Eloise by Kay Thompson

“So terrifically funny, and, you know, there’s no punctuation in the book. It runs on like the madcap chatter in a British comedy! Also, I love the use of language.  Sometimes the vocabulary is a reach, of course, but I think children can appreciate the music in words.”

9) Ludwig Bemelmans’ books

“Ludwig Bemelmans has been a personal inspiration for almost everything in my life. His books, especially the Madeline books, not only inspired my style, but my attitude towards life. Reading about him helped me realize, “Ah! You can write and you can paint, you can do work for adults and for children. You can travel, you can be a bon vivant — which I’m not — and, even in the midst of tragedy, you can have this great joy in life.”

Max Stavinsky

Max Makes a Million by Maira Kalman

P.S. The American history-loving Maira says she is currently finishing up a book about Thomas Jefferson, which will be published later this year. And she’s working on two more books, both tied to an exhibit she’s guest curating for the Cooper-Hewitt (“Maira Kalman Selects”) when it reopens in 2014. One will be an alphabet book for children about design, and the other will be a book for adults on design.

If We Lived in Colonial Times

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There’s nothing like reading about the hardships of life for children centuries ago to squelch (albeit momentarily) the whining of today’s lazy, spoiled middle-class American kids. What mom hasn’t relished the moment her children realized that little Laura and Mary Ingalls spent hours uncomplainingly mending, dusting, fetching water, tending livestock and minding Carrie? Not to mention the fact that they practically danced a jig when Ma made them cakes dusted with white sugar.

A book that made a huge impression on me when I was a child was If You Lived in Colonial Times. (Written by genius sadist Ann McGovern in 1964.) Reading it, you got the same grotesque pleasure you got from reading the Guinness Book of World Records; knowing it was all true made it totally horrifying and compelling in the best possible way.

You learned things like: The schoolmaster would whip you with a birch branch if you didn’t know your lessons. If you forgot to bring firewood to school in winter you had to sit in the coldest part of the room. At dinner, children could not say one word, and everybody ate standing up. You could not laugh on Sunday. If you got sick and there was no doctor around, the town barber would do the bloodletting. And instead of everybody lying on an overstuffed sofa in front of the big-screen TV, this is what you’d be doing with your family on a Tuesday night:

I was psyched to buy my kids a copy of the book when I saw it on display at the Smithsonian gift shop in D.C. a couple years ago. The cover doesn’t quite have the charm of the original, but what irritated me was the fact that the “new and updated!” version (below) is missing an illustration that I found particularly fascinating as a child.

It was a picture of the colonialists sitting in church on Sunday. According to the book, there was someone called a tithing man who walked around the meetinghouse with a long wooden pole with a wooden knob at one end. If you fell asleep during church, he knocked you on the head. I remember loving a double-page illustration of the moment he was about to rap some poor, snoring colonialist on the noggin. For some reason, it’s not in the new edition. Tis a shame.