The Story of Chopsticks
by Ying Chang Compestine
Illustrated by YongSheng Xuan
Holiday House, 2001
ISBN 0-8234-1526-0
$16.95

Author Ying Chang Compestine is like a bridge. She has published several cookbooks on Asian cooking with another coming out in 2002. She was born and raised in Wuhan, China, moved to Boulder to attend graduate school at Colorado University, taught sociology here and in China, decided to stay in Boulder and started a family. Her second children's book, The Story of Chopsticks, is now in the bookstores and she has more Chinese cookbooks and more children's stories about Chinese culture coming out later this year.

Crossing back and forth between two cultures in no longer strange for Compestine. It is who she is. "After living in the U.S. for 13 years," she says, "I wanted to combine my passion towards China and my love for my new home in America. I felt an urge to write books that would introduce Americans to Chinese customs and values." And it is that ordinariness of being a bridge that makes her children's tales work so well. Compestine makes her characters real, their experiences believable and like all good travelers, she shares her humanity.

Since the actual origin of chopsticks cannot be traced (the author notes state they may have oriented in China as early as the eleventh century B.C.E.), The Story of Chopsticks is a playfully clever version of how it might have happened. Kúai, (in Mandarin Chinese chopsticks are called Kúai zi, "quick ones") the youngest of three sons, lived with his family in a China where people still ate with their hands. This meant they had to wait for food to cool before eating and little Kúai could never get enough to eat. His hunger found a solution and he brought two sticks from the kindling fire to dinner and speared his chicken and sweet potatoes before his brother could touch the food. His family recognized his cleverness and soon they all started using sticks. At a big fancy wedding, the three brothers pulled out their chopsticks and soon all the children ran outside to get sticks. In the aftermath of the uproar, Kúai's chopsticks got approval and his stomach got full.

Compestine's story is strong enough to stand-alone but YongSheng Xuan illustrates it with brilliant woodcut paintings. Each page is story in itself. The woodcut style, a laborious process, is perfectly suited to the story. It gives a sense of formality without stuffiness. It allows the reader to smell the chicken cooking, to feel the hot sticky rice and to see the splendor of the wedding feast.

Compestine and Xuan are working on three more books, The Story of Noodles, The Story of Kites and the Story of Paper, providing their eager readers with a bridge between history and the 21st century, between two continents and between children of all ages. " I saw this as a way of bringing the two cultures closer together," Compestine says. And indeed the delicious story of The Story of Chopsticks makes her audience eager to try grabbing steamed dumplings with their chopsticks, quick or not.

Copyright © 2002 Anna Stewart. All rights reserved worldwide.