Peter’s Chinese Kid Lit #5: Cowardly Rat
June 23rd, 2009 | View Comments
We start a new series of short stories. Each story highlights one of the animals that make up the Chinese Zodiac. Today’s story is about the rat.
膽小如鼠
dan3 xiao3 ru2 shu3
The Cowardly Rat
According to the Zodiac, the rat is seen for his intelligence and cunning yet sensitive nature. In this story, we meet a rat prince who insists that he is brave, despite his species’ reputation to be fearful and meek. To prove his bravery on behalf of all members of the genus Rattus, he reads a fairytale and decides to go slay a fire-breathing dragon. Yeah… good luck with that.
Alas, no fire breathing dragons are to be found. But he stumbles a princess who’s been locked up in a tower. I shall call her Asian Rapunzel, given her long flowing braid in the illustration. There’s even an evil which who calls up to her, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your raven hair.” (Ok, so the last part was a slight mistranslation on my part.)
Anyhoo, the rat abandons the idea of dragon slaying and decides to rescue the princess. Upon hearing that the rat prince is there to save her, Asian Rapunzel freaks out. She whips her braid out the window, lashes it to a tree, and thrusts herself out. (In episode 111, Mythbusters. actually proved it’s possible for a rope of human hair to hold the weight of a human, allowing someone to break out of prison.) When the witch comes to check on Asian Rapunzel, the rat sees her hideous face and freaks out.
Moral of the story. Everyone has moments of brave and moments of being a nervous wreck.
Much more condensed (and in a much smaller font than the previous things I’ve read), this story is more advanced both in content and in language than the previous pieces of literature. It is full of idioms which may only be known to a native speaker. It helps the reader learn more colloquial vocabulary. Having the phonetic transliteration with each character helps the reader decipher pronunciation. The man illustrations also give the reader clues as to story elements. While still a children’s story, the themes are less cutesy with rainbows and unicorn sparkles.
It’s definitely worth reading for the idioms alone.
Up next: The story for the Ox for which the title does not have a nice translation. Even my mom got confused when she read the title.
Peter posted this on June 23rd, 2009 @ 3:13pm in Books, Peter's Chinese Kid Lit | Permalink to "Peter’s Chinese Kid Lit #5: Cowardly Rat"
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