The Coin in the Rice in the Spoon: Perspectives within Perspectives in A New Year's Reunion

Abstract

Yu Li-Quiong and Zhu Cheng-Liang’s A New Year’s Reunion (Tuan Yuan) was the first winner of the Feng Zikai Children’s Picture Book Award in 2009 and has since gone on to become a major text in the emerging canon of modern Chinese-language picture books. In English-language translations, it has become available widely outside China and serves as an important entry point for understanding techniques and concerns of contemporary Chinese children’s books. Told by the daughter of a migrant worker briefly returning home between construction jobs, A New Year’s Reunion gives an affectionate, respectful account of the girl’s experience of the story, then hints in the final pages at an adult perspective. Re-reading the story attentive to this second perspective reveals a parallel experience of the same events that enriches without undermining the child’s experience and that articulates potent insights about the power relationship between children and parents. A final reading of the story suggests that the hierarchy implicit in the first two readings may not be as simple as it first appears.