A little girl, her suitcase, and Jamie Lee Curtis
New book aims to teach children about immigration, but without the politics
This Is Me, the 11th volume in a highly successful series of picture books by Jamie Lee Curtis and Laura Cornell, tackles a subject that is of particular interest these days: immigration.
Subtitled A Story of Who We Are & Where We Came From, it focuses on family and stays miles away from political issues (except, maybe, for the author’s brief, subtle note on the back cover). Adopting a child’s-eye view, the story is presented as a class project that begins with a teacher of Asian descent telling her young charges that her great-grandmother “came from a far, distant place. / She came on a boat / with just this small case.”
Showing her students an empty brown suitcase, the teacher tells them about her ancestor’s travels, as a very small child, far from home. No one asked if she wanted to go, but they did give her the small suitcase and tell her that she should fill it with the things she loved best. “Sadly you’ll have to leave / all of the rest.”
The teacher, having itemized the things her great-grandmother chose to put in the case, then presents her students with a challenge: “When you bring this case home, / what will YOU take?”
It’s a good question — one designed to make children think
about the courage it takes to start over in another country. At its best, it’s a question that can get children thinking about what families may have had to go through in leaving a country like Syria, for example, to settle in North America. They might learn to view those children with new understanding and empathy.
Curtis’s rhyming text and Cornell’s buoyant watercolour paintings take a lighthearted approach to an issue that has polarized adults throughout the western world (especially in the U.S. during the election campaign).
In print and pictures, they detail the choices half a dozen
children make and, in the process, show how different and individualistic even very young children can be.
In the end, the teacher addresses herself to the reader: “Now YOU take this case / and imagine it’s true, / that you’re leaving and needing / to choose what says YOU.”
The final illustration is a popup image of the suitcase that opens to a stage-like setting just waiting to be filled with the reader’s favourite things. Well, let’s say pictures of those things, since the flimsiness of the “suitcase” means actual items — even very small ones — could not be contained. (A library edition of the book is available without the
pop-up so teachers and school librarians won’t need to worry about it failing to survive the eager hands of young readers.)
Oh, and the author’s comment on the back cover? If Curtis were forced to pack such a suitcase, she would take “my parents’ wedding rings, my negatives for my photography, and an open mind.” That open mind, one suspects, frequently flinches at remarks made about immigrants of late.
This Is Me
By Jamie Lee Curtis Illustrated by Laura Cornell Workman Publishing, 34 pages, $23.95 Ages four to eight