When I was in third grade (this had to be from 1993 to 1994), one of the books that I read in class was In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson by Betty Bao Lord. It's still one of my favorite books from my childhood. It's about a girl from Chongqing who moves to Brooklyn in 1947, the year that the Dodgers nearly won the World Series against the Yankees. The girl -- to become more "Americanized," she asked her grandfather to change her name to Shirley Temple Wong -- became addicted to baseball by listening to it on the radio, and especially became fond of Jackie Robinson; she felt a kinship with him because he was also thrust into a new world that he wanted to be a part of but where he still felt unwelcome. Over the course of a year, she learns English, makes friends, and even meets Jackie Robinson himself.
But anyway, I mentioned that she was from Chongqing. In references to her hometown, she speaks particularly of a couple of places: one was a network of caves that the people of the city often fled to during Japanese bombing raids, as Chongqing was the capital of Nationalist China during World War II. The other was a marketplace in the old city that was on or near a place called "The Mountain of Ten Thousand Steps," which overlooked the Yangtze River. Do either (well, any, considering there are actually three) of these locations really exist?
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June 15th, 2005, 01:10 PM
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