The Asian Reporter's
BOOK REVIEWS

By Allen Say

Houghton Mifflin, 1997

Hardcover, 32 pages, $17.00

By Josephine Bridges

When Allison’s grandmother sends her a kimono and her mother urges her to try it on and look in the mirror, the girl can’t help noticing that she and her doll, Mei Mei, resemble each other, but she looks nothing like her mother and father. "Where did Mei Mei come from?" she asks, and so begins this adopted child’s struggle to comprehend how she fits into the only family she has ever known.

There’s a stray cat, a big tabby tom, hanging around the fringes of Allison’s life, looking in her window, meowing, and running away, but Allison doesn’t pay the cat much attention at first, and neither does the reader. In the cat, Allen Say has deftly introduced an element of magic in the ordinary. It’s one of the things he does best.

At school, Allison asks her classmates questions about their families, watches the children with their parents and grandparents at the end of the school day. She rides home silently with her mother, then spends the rest of the afternoon destroying toys her parents have had since they were children. "You’re not my mommy," she declares, justifying her indefensible actions, "You’re not my daddy."

Fortunately, Allison isn’t so immersed in her distress that she stops noticing what’s going on around her. When she implores Mei Mei, "Allison isn’t my real name! Do you know what my real name is?" the stray cat sitting outside her window answers, "Meow."

"Don’t you have a mommy?" Allison asks the cat, and then she brings him a saucer of milk. When she asks if she can keep the cat, her mother suggests a kitten instead. "I want this one," she insists, "He doesn’t have a mommy or a daddy."

Allen Say’s illustrations are every bit as engaging as the story itself. Page after page after page, he shows us this lovely, lonely little girl in all her pain and perplexity, and even when we can’t condone her behavior, we are rooting for her. In the remarkable painting of Allison watching the cat lap milk, it’s clear from the expression on her face in profile that her anguish is letting up, compassion moving in to fill its place, right there before our eyes.