Celebrating books, diversity: ‘Watercress’ offers heartfelt tale of immigrant’s experience

This is award season in the children’s book world. The American Library Association announces the Newbery and Caldecott awards — the John Newbery Award for the best fiction for children and the Randolph Caldecott Award for the best illustrated book for young readers.

Donna Barba Higuera, author of “The Last Cuentista,” and Jason Chin, illustrator of “Watercress,” are the 2022 recipients of the John Newbery and Randolph Caldecott medals.

I have not read “The Last Cuentista,” so can’t review it here, but I am happy to share my thoughts on “Watercress” (Holiday House, 2021; $18.99) an autobiographical tale, written by Andrea Wang.

In “Watercress,” a Chinese family is traveling in Ohio “in the old Pontiac/ the red paint faded by years of/ glinting Ohio sun, /pelting rain/and biting snow” when the mom spots watercress growing by a stream at the side of the road. “From the depths of the trunk, /they unearth/ a brown paper bag/ rusty scissors, /and a longing for/ China.” The narrator and her brother have to help gather the watercress. That involves cold water and mud that “squelches/up between my toes.” After a while they have enough and turn toward home.

The parents serve the watercress for supper that night but the narrator refuses to eat it. “’It is fresh,’ Dad says. /’It is free,’ Mom says….” But the narrator thinks, “Free is bad./ Free is/ hand-me-down clothes and/ roadside trash-heap furniture and/ now,/ dinner from a ditch.”

Then the Mom brings from her room a family photo from China. In that photo the mother is a child sitting next to a very thin younger brother. “’During the great/ famine,’ she says, / ‘we ate anything/ we could find,/ but it was still/ not enough.’” And the illustration shows the mom’s family with an empty place at the table. The younger brother is gone. The narrator says she is “ashamed of being ashamed of my family.”

In the course of this brief story we see the narrator grow in understanding of her parents, their lives, and their losses. The last spread shows readers the family eating watercress together.

The award-winning illustrator, Jason Chin, wrote in an illustrator’s note, “When I was painting, I drew on my own memories of exclusion, loss, and guilt with the hope that they might seep into the art and add another layer to Andrea’s remarkable story.”

This is a heartfelt account of an immigration experience. Whether we are immigrants or not we can be enlightened by this look at the complicated emotions involved in leaving one’s home and making a life in a new and foreign culture. ‘Watercress’ will nourish all of us.

In winter, I am often reminded of another Randolph Caldecott award winner (1963) — “The Snowy Day” by Ezra Jack Keats (Viking, 1962; $17.99; paper Puffin, 1976l $5.99). This is a simple and irresistible tale of a city boy experiencing a snowy day. Keats said he was bothered that he never saw in children’s books the children he saw around his Brooklyn neighborhood. Peter is a brown-skinned child — the one of the first to show up in a children’s book, just as a kid — not cartoonish, not jokey.

This brilliant book was named “one of the hundred best books of the century” by the New York Public Library. It is also the New Public Library’s No. 1 book on the “top check outs of all time” list.

For those of us who love this book we have “A Poem for Peter: The Story of Ezra Jack Keats and the Creation of The Snowy Day” (Viking, 2016; $18.99) written by Andrea Davis Pinkney with pictures by Lou Fancher and Steve Johnson.

In it we learn that Keats’s parents — Benjamin and Gussie Katz — were Jewish immigrants from Poland, hoping to escape oppression and discrimination. There was little opportunity in Brooklyn for immigrants. Pinkney writes: “Ma Gussie was a strong-willed woman/ with a paintbrush she mostly kept secret. /Ma Gussie, /a mother with hushed-up wishes/ of becoming a fine artist,/ Fine — as in cultured,/ Fine — as in refined,/ Fine — as in beauty for beauty’s sake.”

Perhaps young Ezra inhaled her dreams. He was paid for painting signs as early as third grade. But he wanted more than sign painting. His father began to bring home “half-used tubes of paint/ from artists who hung around/ at Pete’s Coffee Pot.” He also spent money on tubes of paint for Ezra.

As a young man, Ezra was invited to join the Art Students League. Later he painted for the Works Progress Administration. He joined the war effort and painted “posters and booklets. / … charts … maps and pictures.”

After the war, in an effort to overcome discrimination for being Jewish, he rearranged his name from Jacob (Jack) Ezra Katz to Ezra Jack Keats. Eventually he found work illustrating children’s books. Then he was asked to write and illustrate his own book. And that’s where Peter came in. With Peter, Keats had found his neighborhood. He had found his “voice.” He went on to write six more books featuring Peter.

In an author’s note Pinkney says of Keats, “As an artist who had grown up surrounded by poverty and anti-Semitism, Ezra understood what is was like to be excluded.” She notes her own love as a child for Keats’s work. “As an African American child growing up in the 1960s, at a time when I didn’t see others like me in children’s books, I was profoundly affected by the expressiveness of Keats’s illustrations.” She goes on to say, “Keats was a master of urban orchestration. His books celebrated the beauties of New York City’s neighborhoods. They featured street corners, front stoops, graffiti, manholes, and storefronts. They included black and Latino children and families, homeless people, and colorful construction workers.”

Such books as these never stop giving us gifts. Perhaps the best gift of all is the chance to look in on other lives to understand our different backgrounds and yet see all that connects us. Let us keep reading — all the books we can get our hands on.

Jacqueline Briggs Martin of Mount Vernon writes books for children.