The Green Ginger Jar: A Chinatown Mystery

They Came From Books

by Clara Ingram Judson, Paul Brown (Illustrator)

Ai-mei, twelve-year-old daughter of an Asian family living in Chicago's Chinatown, gives away an old ginger jar, then discovers that it is a valuable heirloom intended to provide the means for her brother to attend college. The mystery which evolves is mildly exciting, the situation is treated humorously, and the Chinese people are presented with good taste and understanding.

211 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1949

About the author

Clara Ingram Judson (1879–1960) was an American author who wrote over 70 books for children. She was born on May 4, 1879, in Logansport, Indiana, and married James McIntosh Judson in 1901. Her first children's book was Flower Fairies, published in 1915. She is probably most famous for her books in the Mary Jane Series, first published in 1918.

Her radio program on homemaking debuted in 1928, making her one of the first women broadcasters.

She died on May 24, 1960, in Evanston, Illinois, shortly before she would receive the second Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, just after Laura Ingalls Wilder herself. She later got her own award, the Clara Ingram Judson Award.

Reviews

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fifty years ago this was the first book I ever returned to the library unfinished. That to me then was practically a sin, and it haunted me for years. Cut me some slack, I was eleven or twelve and I always read things straight through, hardly coming up for air. This book however was one too many for me in those days, though I couldn't have told you why.
The only reason I checked it out of the library was that part of it was in my sixth grade reading book and I was curious. Turns out the extract that was in my book came right at the end of the novel, where All Is Revealed, but there is a lot of other stuff before that in a book 200 pages long. I remember being surprised that there was quite so much blood in a middle grade novel written in the 1940s: first the car accident where the dog's leg "spurts" (I quote) blood all over Lu's clothes, then a fight in the boys' clubroom leaves blood even on the floor (which is a bit too much for the small amount of scuffling that takes place), then an accident that leaves three kids "cut and bleeding." I bailed after the clubroom fight because all that blood didn't seem to make sense or fit the story.

The other day the title came back to mind and I found it on the Internet Archive. The older me found the blood less upsetting (though just as unnecessary) but the writing style was extremely choppy and the narrative voice was so busy trying to make the Chinese people "sound foreign" that it became stilted and uncomfortable to read. The authoress was born in the 1870s, and it shows. The book is very much written from the outside in; the Acknowledgements list all the detailed, wonderful help she got from other white people in the research...and at the end, a quick short list of three or four Chinese names with no details. I wonder how they felt about this book, if indeed they even looked at a finished copy. Apparently Judson wrote a whole string of "immigrant novels" in a series called "They Came From..." Stilted language was her way of othering. White racism toward Chinese Americans is never adressed, apart from Father Chen saying he "can't find a house for a Chinese family" outside Chinatown. No, the white teachers tell Ai-Mei "You Chinese shouldn't be so shy about leaving Chinatown" and going into the wider city of Chicago. See? It's all their fault!
Toward the end a big deal is made of "Ten-ten Day", a holiday I never heard of anywhere else. I looked it up online and found very little information. But it served to provide a party atmosphere for the Big Reveal, and the book ends with (ugh) the American national anthem.
Of course it does.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written enough and engaging enough for me to finish it. Some of the plot lines were slightly nonsensical, but made sense in view of the Chinese customs involved. An interesting time period, as it was published in 1949. The characters were well delineated and the inside into a Chinese family dynamic during that time was interesting. The ending was also very good.

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was searching for something else and stumbled across this in the library's catalogue. And then, looking at the date, I just had to investigate and see if it was good or not. It's a pretty decent kids' book. As she notes in the introduction, the author did a pile of research. She generally avoids falling into the traps that an American author of the time (1948) could easily have fallen into. She tries to tackle assimilation vs. tradition and does a good job until the end, I think. It's not a bad ending but it doesn't fully convince. It was interesting but about halfway through, I kind of lost interest and had to make myself finish.