Like a Dandelion

PreS-Gr 2–Like Thao Lam’s The Paper Boat, Lee’s story begins with a childhood experience set against a threatening landscape from which her family fled: “Like feathery seeds, we take flight, finding a new home even in the tiniest of spaces.” The scene right before a cozy, comforting city nightscape of lighted windows in apartment buidings is comprised of refugees and barbed wire, camouflage and barracks. A familiar story of an asylum-seeking family unfolds in idyllic scenes of a child’s play with a dandelion. The child and mother move in, settle down, and in one scene are shown reading Lee’s book In the Snow. From that reassurance in the backdrop comes some of the obstacles; the narrator, possibly Cambodian, is shy, but finds a little ginger-haired girl as a friend. By autumn, dandelion seeds are scattered in the wind and another girl, wearing a hijab, and her brother are the newcomers. An end note explains that the Cambodian refugee camp was in Thailand before the family emigrated to the United States in 1975. The simplicity of Lee’s melodic telling belies the serious and complex events before she arrived in the United States, and treats childhood and friendships as natural acts, arising from good soil and tending. It’s as hopeful as her dedication, to the country that welcomed her, and leaves to readers an expectation that they must rise to.