Just So Stories

Allen & Unwin

August 2023

ISBN: 9781761180224

Publisher: A&U Children’s

Imprint: A & U Children

RRP: $23.99

Like many others, I have read both fictional and factual accounts of the extreme hardship and brutality of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, an ill-conceived scheme to bring China to an ideal Communist Utopia. It resulted in the deaths of an estimated 30 million people due to starvation in the early 1960s and, most hard-hit were the rural farmers who had traditionally been subsistence farmers, providing their own crops for consumption and some for barter. When collectivism was ruthlessly introduced, along with the orders by cadres with no idea of farming, disaster struck. It does not make for pleasant reading at all.

13-year-old Fu, his younger sister Pei and their mother, Yun, struggle to survive in their small rural village, already severely impacted by poor conditions. The head of the family has been gone for almost a decade, the children have no idea where he is but it is revealed that he has immigrated to Australia and is trying desperately to create a stable and financially secure life for them all.

But the little family is threatened, firstly by the absence of a head of the house, and then the enforced brutal new order. When Yun dies, of malnutrition, the future is even grimmer for these two children. But fortune is on their side, when a young and idealistic officer, determined to make a difference to the disaster she sees being created by the old men, helps the two escape.

The children have nothing but a photograph, and some scanty documents including a printed menu from a Melbourne Chinese restaurant to help them traverse from Southern China to the very bottom of the very bottom of the world‘, a country that is determined to keep people of colour out of its borders. An impossible quest, in fact.

Yet, little by little, with the help of intelligent and compassionate strangers, they are able to inch their way, barefoot and in rags, to a land with wonders such as they have never before seen.

This is a powerful and moving narrative, and one with which I was fully engaged – I read it in a single sitting, as a matter of fact. My heart went out to these two children, and made me wonder how many more such children do not share such fortunate endings.

I think this is the first middle-grade novel I have encountered which describes the utter wretchedness that was imposed upon the Chinese people by the Maoist power-mongers. Rebecca Lim has done an extraordinary job of treading a careful line in describing the despair and the cruelty of the regime, without becoming too graphically distressing for young readers.

Many, I have no doubt, will be taken aback by reading about the White Australia Policy – yet another shameful episode in our nation’s history. Slowly, slowly we edge our way to a more empathic and kind country, we hope.

I would think that for many children of different origins (not matter how many generations back), this would be a catalyst to finding out more about their own family histories, and a great opportunity to launch a learning project with this focus.

The themes throughout of resilience, tenacity, loyalty, compassion and family will strike a chord with all who read it. I highly recommend it to you for astute readers from around Upper Primary on to Mid-Secondary. I anticipate that we will be seeing this in numerous award lists in the coming year.