23. Dumpling Days by Grace Lin

 

23. Dumpling Days by Grace Lin


Lin, G. (2012). Dumpling Days. NY: Little Brown and Company.

Pacy Lin is our main character in the story.  She and her family spend a month in Taiwan visiting family.  Pacy and her sisters feel as if they are entering a new world.  They don’t speak Chinese and are not familiar with the customs.  They feel like outsiders despite that their parents grew up there. As the month passes, Pacy and her sisters learn about their Taiwanese heritage.  They take art classes, eat some amazing (and strange) foods, and hear stories from their relatives about the Taiwanese customs.  At the end of their visit, Pacy and her sisters find who they are by embracing their Taiwanese heritage while still holding on to their American ways and ideas.  

I learned so much about the Chinese/Taiwanese culture while reading the book. The description of the food the characters ate made me want to visit just to eat! This story is good for teaching conflict. The custom about ghost month represents how Pacy feels about who she is.  She is feeling like a ghost because she has not found her identity.  At the end of the story when ghost month was over, she begins to embrace her two cultures.  Pacy has internal conflict between her American and Taiwanese cultures.  You can see the battle in almost everything Pacy does. Her artistic talent, the food she eats.  Everything she experiences in Taiwan is compared to how it is in America. She also has external conflict with other Taiwanese people.  She doesn’t know the language and is always running into criticism because if it.  She is sometimes called a “twinkie”.

I could not find any good teaching resources for this book. To use this book in a classroom, you will have to create your own.  I did find a video of Grace Lin reading from the book.

https://youtu.be/wsGtOvjtq2s

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