Watercress is this year’s winner of the Caldecott Medal for the illustrations by Jason Chin, a Newbery Honor for the writing by Andrea Wang, and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the picture book category. And it deserves all the accolades. It is an outstanding book about the power of story to connect generations and to heal. Torn between her parents’ Chinese culture and her peer’s white-dominated, Midwestern American culture, and embarrassed by her family’s poverty, a girl is mortified when her parents spot Watercress growing wild by the side of the road and pull over to harvest some to put in a dish at dinnertime. At dinner, the girl refuses to eat the dish, feeling the pinch of wearing hand-me-down clothes, sitting on “trash heap” furniture, and being offered food free from a roadside ditch. She feels ashamed of her family, all too keenly aware of the differences her white classmates point out at her small-town, Ohio school. Then her mother shares her own childhood loss of her younger brother, the uncle no one mentions, who didn’t survive the famine in China and the girl comes to a better understanding of her parents, and a desire to create new memories with them.
Wang’s text, inspired by a childhood experience, uses language that evokes layers of memory, and emotion. For the illustrations Chin uses watercolor, a medium used in both Chinese and Western art, along with both Chinese and Western brushes. His watercolor washes create a feeling of time and place from memory, and his use of sepia tones to depict the parents’ memories of China help the story flow seamlessly from modern-day Ohio fields, to the parents’ childhood in a famine-stricken China.
Watercress is a masterwork of language and illustration, and a great book to share and talk about with kids ages 5 & up.