Customer Reviews

Everyday Life: Through Chinese Peasant Art

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Everyday Life. Through Chinese Peasant Art. (Mandarin_chinese Edition)
I highly recommend this book to parents and children who want to learn more about the unique aspects of Chinese culture and a little bit Mandarin. With each pictorial story written in beautiful bilingual poems, this book describes vividly the daily lives of Chinese children , especially during the joyful festival season. Readers can also see what typical Chinese village houses or bridges look like; the games children play and the folklore behind each story. The book also answers many questions that people have about traditional Chinese myths : What is it like when dragons dance? What birds build the feathery bridge for the boy cowherd and the girl weaver to meet each other on the Seventh day of the Seventh Moon? What part of the bamboo do pandas eat? How can a chicken feather be used as a game when it is snowing? And many others. I am sure readers of all ages will enjoy flipping through this book, admiring both the story and the accompanied pictures. Even kids who cannot read Chinese or English will enjoy the gorgeous color illustrations and interpret each story in ways they like. This is what a kidergarten teacher told me from her experience when reading this book to her class.

This book brings the everyday life of Chinese peasants vividly alive through the use of simple poems and Chinese peasant arts. It is definitely an enjoyable book. I love reading it together with my three-year-old grand-daughter. The bilingual text and beautiful pictures are great ways to introduce her to Chinese culture.

Ham and eggs, hugs and kisses, poetry and painting-there are some things that were always meant to be together.

Following the four seasons through the activities and festivals of a Chinese year, this book is filled with short verses, each one written in English, Chinese characters, and romanized Chinese, complete with tone marks, so those of us who don't speak Chinese can still attempt to give the music of its sounds a try. Dragons dance, pictures are "sewed into life," kites swoop, trees are decorated with toys during the harvest festival, and winter is greeted with the Chicken Feather Game-while children "Pile Up a Snowman" with "brown mushroom ears, black olive eyes."

Each of the joyful, rollicking verses is accompanied by a painting, done in vivid, gleaming colors and filled with people who are so vitally present that they almost seem in motion. Every picture draws the viewer into the scene and into the lives that leap straight from the page to imaginations. They have been created by folk artists, farmers who paint scenes from their daily lives in tempera mixed with chalk, whose work is now exhibited in a Shanghai gallery.