In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson

"This is a semi-autobiographical novel that was published in 1984, and it is the story of a Chinese family that immigrates to New York City in 1946. Yes. The story starts in China . We have a little girl who is 10 years old, living with her extended family. She appears to be very middle class. Her father is in the States working when he sends for them. It’s really about her learning to assimilate in the US. She’s thrown into year four of primary school in Brooklyn with no English, and she has to learn. The reason Jackie Robinson is in the title is because the way she makes friends is through baseball . The Brooklyn Dodgers, the local baseball team, is making it to the World Series and the school and the whole neighbourhood is baseball crazy. They’re listening to the games on the radio, they’re playing baseball, talking baseball and trading cards. This is how she makes her own place in the world because she’s also crazy about it. The book is all written in English. The English that the book is written in is fluent when she speaks to her parents and when she’s thinking in Chinese. But it becomes very awkward when she’s speaking to her classmates, and she can’t pronounce things right. The transliteration of her mispronunciations is funny, but with today’s sensitivity I think they may strike a slightly sour note because it feels a little bit like we’re making fun of her pronunciation. I don’t think that’s the case; this is the author’s experiences and language acquisition is a big feature of this story. She’s very close to her family at home in China, and she writes to them. It is mentioned that she’s losing her Chinese characters, and she stops writing so frequently because it’s so much effort for her to write in Chinese. But it’s a very upbeat book. She does get bullied quite a bit in the beginning, and she’s very, very lonely as she’s trying to make her place for herself. I, too, as I was coming back to the United States at the same age as this character, used to get beaten up because I had a weird accent. Again, anybody who moves around can relate to this, trying to figure out how things work in the local school where you don’t know the rituals. It’s not even that you don’t know the words, it’s that everything is alien. But I would say that you don’t get a huge sense of regret at her losing the language, she’s really very much ready to move on. This book is an interesting contrast with Jean Fritz’s book, they make good companion pieces."