I can’t believe this book was first published 25 years ago: but Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China, retold by Ai-Ling Louie and illustrated by Ed Young, is just as fresh today – and of course, being a fairy-tale, it is timeless anyway. It makes a lovely bed-time story – and would work well, too, as a class story-time readaloud.
The story will be familiar in its essence to most children and this is a lovely variation. Or perhaps I should say that the Cinderella story we all know and love follows the pattern of this lovely story: on the book’s dedication page, there is a salient quotation from Iona and Peter Opie’s The Classic Fairy Tales (now a bit of a classic itself). This dates the story of Yeh Shen to The Miscellaneous Record of Yu Yang, which first appeared during the T’ang Dynasty (618-907AD), about 1,000 years before the oldest European version.
The major elements are all there: the rags and chores, the wicked step-mother, the party and the magic slippers. The main difference is that the fairy god-mother figure in the story is actually a magic fish. The fish is Yeh-Shen’s only friend until it is killed by the step-mother. Yeh-Shen learns of it magic powers and gathers up the bones, which can now grant her special wishes. At first, her requests are bound up with survival as she asks for food to eat; but then, as the party approaches:
“Oh, dear friend,” she said, kneeling before the precious bones, “I long to go to the festival, but I cannot show myself in these rags. Is there somewhere I could borrow clothes fit to wear to the feast?” At once she found herself dressed in a gown of azure blue [and] on her tiny feet were the most beautiful slippers she had ever seen. They were woven of golden threads, in a pattern like the scales of a fish…
The fish is also the motif for Ed Young’s stunning illustrations throughout: each image from the story is set against an enormous, carp-like fish, to the extent that sometimes the characters are even enclosed within its gaping mouth. The backgrounds are starkly white but the pages are divided up into red-bordered, screen-like frames, which also help to convey the magic at work, since the fish’s bulk simply moves across them. His shading is beautiful… and I would love to know how many colors he actually used!
