Building bridges through the language of play
Review of "Yuna's Cardboard Castles" by Marie Tang.
YUna’s Cardboard Castles
Marie Tang
Illustrated by Jieting Chen
Beaming Books, 2022.
As Yuna, the protagonist of Marie Tang’s imaginative book, watches her parents “fold, fit, and tuck old things into new spaces,” the young girl wonders “how she fit into her new home.” Yuna and her parents have just immigrated from Japan to the United States, and she is homesick.
As Yuna listens to neighbourhood children play, she feels isolated because she doesn’t speak their language. But she has an idea about how to communicate with them. She is familiar with origami, the ancient art of paper folding, and begins to fold, fit, and tuck paper and cardboard, creating colorful balls, a rice cake stand, cranes, boats, pansies and a castle. But she still fails to connect with the children.
One day, a boy’s kite crashes in Yuna’s yard, and the two begin halting communication with waves, nods, and working together on paper and cardboard creations. Soon, other children begin to explore Yuna and her friend’s cardboard world. The result? “Although Yuna didn’t speak the language the other kids spoke . . . she sort of did.”
Artist Jieting Chen’s buoyant illustrations and author Marie Tang’s winsome narrative capture the varying emotions of a child trying to find her place in a strange world. In an author’s note, Tang relates how this poignant picture book for children ages 3 to 8 is based on her experiences as a child who moved with her family from Hong Kong to America. She writes, “I wanted more than anything to play with the neighborhood kids, but they hardly noticed me…So I took what I had and started to create imaginary worlds from origami paper and cardboard moving boxes. Little by little, the neighborhood kids took notice… English came slowly, but the language of play bound us together.”
In Yuna, children will encounter a feisty, determined girl who uses her gifts to build bridges to others who are different from herself.
