Peter’s Chinese Kid Lit #4: The Witch’s Determination
June 6th, 2009 | View Comments
Sorry for the month long hiatus. I’ve been busy tap dancing and being a performer on stage.
This installment of Chinese Kid Lit returns to the story of the Old Lady Witch who turned into a bench. We rejoin her story many years later.
魔女的決心
Mo3 nu3 de5 jue2 xin1
The Witch’s Determination
At the end of the previous story, the witch had turned herself into a beautiful park bench. Now, with the passage of time, she has become a worn and weathered park bench. This does not matter to her since she meets a little girl named 小萌 Xiao3 Meng2 (Little Sprout). Little Sprout sits on the park bench every day after school and waits until her dad comes on the bus to pick her up after work. The witch learns that Little Sprout’s mother is in the hospital. Over time, she develops an affinity to Little Sprout and her family. Little Sprout’s mother has taken very ill and can no longer attend the park. Little Sprout promises the bench that she’ll come back, asking the bench to wait for her return.
One day, dark shadowy figures, come and survey the park area. They’ve been hired to replace the ugly old bench with a new one. The old one wood be turned into woodchips. The news, of course, is very unsettling and alarming to the witch. She summons all her might and turns herself back into human form.
Overjoyed at having overcome her temporary amnesia, she runs home to find everything covered in a thick layer of dust and cobwebs. She cleans up her house with her broom, only to remember that it was her magic broom! She takes her broom out for a spin to the park in time to see Little Sprout coming. Remembering her promise to Little Sprout, she goes back to her old spot and turns herself back into a shiny new park bench.
Little Sprout sad her old bench is gone, but happy that the new one is just as good. She also brings good news. Her mother is leaving the hospital! Just then, the broom knocks itself over. Like any curious child, Little Sprout deduces that this must be a magic broom, gets on it, and flies away to oblivion. Or something like that.
The Old Lady Witch series (if you can call two books a series), is much more entertaining and enjoyable to read than that of the Little Fox with anxiety issues. They’re cute stories and sequential, which gives emerging readers something to look forward to. From an instructional standpoint, vocabulary is repeated enough throughout the book that I was able to recognize characters without looking at the phonetic spelling. There are also enough context clues to help fill in some of the gaps. I do admit, I did have to consult the dictionary and my mother for certain words and phrases. However, these resources were not used as often as when I started reading two months ago. Woo!
More books were brought back from Taiwan, so stay tuned for future installments of Chinese Kid Lit. I promise no more month-long waits between posts!
Peter posted this on June 6th, 2009 @ 4:24pm in Books, Chinese, Peter's Chinese Kid Lit, Reading | Permalink to "Peter’s Chinese Kid Lit #4: The Witch’s Determination"
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