Isn't it weird, how a book will sometimes speak to you from a book store or library, call your attention to it and demand that you take it home?
That's what happened with me and this skinny novel last week. I saw it in a book store, pictured the unread books in stacks next to my bed, and ignored it. But as I walked on by, the little hen on the cover called out my name.
I knew nothing about this book, other than it was translated into English from Korean lit. As I started it, I realized the pull was something more; this was a story told in the spirit of Watership Down and Animal Farm; meaning, a tale of animals that live together and communicate as humans do. I don't know why, but these stories have always worked for me. I blame The Bremen Town Musicians in my youth.
But, here's what's weird. This is. . . an adoption story. And I'm a mom with three kids and two adoption stories and here I am, unexpectedly meeting Sprout, a little hen who “had only one wish, to hatch an egg and watch the birth of a chick.”
Sprout, when we first meet her, appears diseased and has been left for dead in a pile of chicken carcasses. She escapes, but she's made an enemy of a relentless weasel and it seems like she'll never fulfill her dream of becoming a mother.
She has named herself Sprout, because “a sprout is the mother of flowers, it breathes, stands firm against rain and wind, keeps sunlight, and rears blindingly white flowers. If it weren't for sprouts, there'd be no trees. A sprout is vital.”
And, before you know it, you want Sprout to become a mother as badly as she does, and when she finds that abandoned egg in a nest, you're almost praying that it hatches.
It does; it hatches, but it's a duck instead of a chick, and, while Sprout doesn't mind in the least, she is shocked to discover that she and her new baby are rejected by both the chickens and the ducks. The chickens think it's disgraceful; she should abandon the duck immediately to save face, and the ducks praise her for hatching the baby, but think she should relinquish the baby immediately to his “own kind.”
And this Caucasian mother ached for Sprout and can remember so clearly boarding an airplane on a Chinese airlines and having a Chinese man spit on her, kick the back of her seat in disgust the entire flight, and then get out of his seat repeatedly to stick his finger in her face and curse in Mandarin at her.
Then she remembers arriving back in the United States, only to have a Caucasian bus driver sneer threateningly right into her ear, “What are you lady, some kind of Christian? You think you can do this good deed with your Chinese baby and be martyred forever in Heaven?”
Oh, yes. I've been Sprout. I've been badgered, I've been stared at (as have my kids), and I've had some of the nastiest things said to me that aren't worth strengthening by repeating.
Like Sprout, I have walked through the barnyard and heard, “A chicken hatching a duck! What a ridiculous sight!”
I have had to spread my wings wide over their heads to protect them and bolster them inside for the day they become too big for my wingspan.
Like the baby duck, who becomes Greentop, my daughters may one day wonder, “What if the ducks never accept me?”
And, like the hen Sprout, I may need to advise them, “Do what you want to do. Ask yourself what that is.”
This is a book that is written in simple language, with a simple message: life is tough, the enemy is ever-present, but you have courage and joy inside you. Seek what you want and need and stand tall.
The final paragraph is almost paralyzing in its strength and beauty.