Yoko

published	November 13th 1998 by Hyperion
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0786803959 (isbn13: 9780786803958)
ebook
pages	32
description	It is Yoko's first day at school, so of course her mother wants to send her off with healthy comfort food for lunch--a delectable package of homemade...more [close] It is Yoko's first day at school, so of course her mother wants to send her off with healthy comfort food for lunch--a delectable package of homemade sushi. "Have a wonderful day at school, my Little Cherry Blossom," her mother says as Yoko climbs into the bus. And it would have been, had it not been for lunchtime. Timothy brings a peanut butter and honey sandwich. Tulip has Swiss cheese on rye. The Franks brothers have beans and franks. But when Yoko opens her cooler of rice rolls with "the crispiest cucumber, the pinkest shrimp, the greenest seaweed, and the tastiest tuna," one of the Franks brothers announces, "Ick. It's green. It's seaweed." Tulip and Fritz chime in, "Yuck-o-rama." Rosemary Wells (Voyage to the Bunny Planet), with her expressive, bright-eyed, chubby-cheeked animal kingdom, has once again successfully tapped into the emotional world of children. The embarrassment of bringing an uncool lunch to school! What child hasn't wanted to hide under the cafeteria table when caught with a gooey enchilada or a slice of vegetarian lentil loaf? Fortunately, Yoko's teacher concocts a plan to stop the teasing. Parents who have more ambitious hopes for their children's lunches than Fritos, PB&Js, and Oreos will be relieved to discover that the happy ending does not include Yoko's giving up her comfort meal or, more importantly, her heritage. (Ages 4 and older) --Gail Hudson [close]
date added	02-18-07 edit book

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Matt rated it:

09/03/08

bookshelves: childrens

Read in September, 2008

recommends it for: No one. Don't drink the kool-aid, even in small doses.

For reasons I can't entirely put my finger on, I'm not a big fan of Rosemary Wells. The closest I can get to it is to say that I think she speaks downward to the child reader a bit too much, but perhaps I would feel otherwise were I a three year old. Certainly my three year olds enjoy Wells more than I do, but on the other hand they just love to read and enjoy most anything with words and pictures.

But in the case of 'Yoko', there is more to my distaste than that.

'Yoko' is a simple st...more For reasons I can't entirely put my finger on, I'm not a big fan of Rosemary Wells. The closest I can get to it is to say that I think she speaks downward to the child reader a bit too much, but perhaps I would feel otherwise were I a three year old. Certainly my three year olds enjoy Wells more than I do, but on the other hand they just love to read and enjoy most anything with words and pictures.

But in the case of 'Yoko', there is more to my distaste than that.

'Yoko' is a simple story of a child who doesn't fit in. But particularly, 'Yoko' doesn't fit in because she eats sushi.

From that I suppose we are to presume that she is different thereby.

The problem is my kids eat sushi and bean burritos and chicken korma and lasagna and shrimp lo mein and spring rolls and chicken schwarma and frankfurters and jerk chicken and well you get the idea, and they have pretty much since they were weaned. Are we to assume that they are Japanese, or Mexican, or Hindi, or Italian, or Chinese, or Thai, or Turkish, or German, or Caribbean or anything else? Of course not. My girls don't know and hopefully can't comprehend that eating sushi makes you different. I don't want it to enter into their imaginations that eating sushi makes you different. They have no basis for imagining that someone could be excluded no the basis of dress or what food they eat or what skin color they have.

What really annoys me is that in order to create this multicultural fairy tale, the first thing that it becomes necessary to do is stuff everyone into a sterotype and imagine that they are different. That is, in order for the story to make any sense, we must imagine that there is some specially unique experience to being a 'sushi eating person' and that this experience and set of perferences is held in common to all naturally 'sushi eating persons'. What a load of hooey. We might as well imagine that there is some unique experience you gain from having a particular skin color, and that you share this perspective with everyone who shares the same skin color. This is not a perspective on life I really want my girls to have.

But even more than that, do we really imagine that in eating sushi, or lasagna, or chicken korma or anything really that we obtain any gift of empathy or cultural understanding for anyone? Whether we eat sushi or lasagna or wear a fez or a cowboy hat or paint Buddha or the Christ is ultimately a trivial cultural difference. If there was no cultural gap larger than whether we liked our fish raw or fried, then we'd live in a world of mutual understanding and empathy and no barrier of belief or mode of behavior could possibly divide us. It is certainly true that our art, architecture, music, food, and so forth mutually enrich us, but it is equally true that these are both the most shallow manifestations of a peoples culture and the most easily borrowed and assimilated. The real things that divide are sadly much deeper, much more profound, and often cannot be borrowed because they are incompatible. I can decide to eat sushi one day and spaghetti the next, and doing so creates no real change in who I am. It's ultimately meaningless. But I can't decide that people of a different skin color are people one day, and then decide that they are not the next because this is a real change. I can't decide that real authority derives from a mandate from the people one day, and then the next decide that all property is vested in the state and that the people only have the usury of it. I can eat burritos and chicken shwarma at the same meal, and I can even take sushi and put a fruit compote on it and it none of it really effects who I am in any deep fashion. What I taste with my tongue isn't who I am in any meaningful way.

But I can't mingle what I taste in my heart and say that I haven't changed in any meaningful way. The fairy tale told is profoundly wrong and I can't help but feel it gets my children off on the wrong foot and would be - if they internalized it in any way - a real barrier to actual understanding....less

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