Cao Wenxuan is one of China's most beloved children's authors and winner of the 2016 Hans Christian Andersen Award. The English translation of his lyrical middle-grade novel Bronze and Sunflower is something to celebrate.
This moving story brings to life two devoted siblings: Bronze, the mysterious, mute young son of impoverished farmers in a remote Chinese village, and Sunflower, the seven-year-old city girl who comes to the country with her artist father after he is consigned to forced labor and reeducation during the harsh years of the Cultural Revolution. When her father drowns, Sunflower is adopted by Bronze's loving parents, the poorest people in the village. Like Laura Ingalls of the Little House on the Prairie books, Sunflower and her new family endure fire, locusts, freezing winters and starvation. Together they struggle on, each sacrificing to help the others. Bronze walks miles to the nearest town in freezing weather so he can sell shoes woven from river reeds to pay for Sunflower's schooling. Sunflower steals away on a boat so she can scavenge valuable ginkgo nuts at a distant plantation to raise funds for her grandmother's medical care.
The author, who grew up amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and often uses it as a setting for his novels, faces the hardships of village life head-on. Children are tied to trees and beaten for misbehavior, and when starvation takes hold, people grow so desperate they think "about gnawing on stones." But the natural world is a consolation, especially to Bronze, who sees a black bird as "a dark spirit, here one minute and gone the next." Despite privations, small pleasures--like riding to school on the back of a water buffalo or creating a sparkling necklace out of icicles--make life beautiful. The details about rural Chinese life are a revelation. Among other things, we learn that "new rice has a pale-green skin, like a luminous coating of oil, and when it is cooking, it gives off the most wonderful aroma." Cao shows English-speaking readers a foreign world where time is measured in the seasonal comings and goings of the swallows, but also a familiar one where the fabric of family is woven from shared hopes and unexpected acts of kindness. --Ann Shaffer, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: This graceful story of a girl growing up in a poor village during China's Cultural Revolution introduces English-speaking readers to the work of Cao Wenxuan.