Eagle Book Club

A Jar of Dreams by Yoshiko Uchida is a very inspiring book. It takes place in California during the depression, and center to the story is an eleven year old Japanese girl named Rinko. Rinko finds herself at school feeling put down and demeaned because she is picked on cruelly by the boys and, even worse, completely ignored by the girls. She has dreams of becoming a teacher one day. Her parents put tremendous emphasis and effort into their kid’s college funds. Her older brother, Cal, is studying to be an engineer, but when he starts to give up on his dream, Rinko starts doubting whether she can ever be a teacher. That summer, her mother’s sister, Aunt Waka comes to visit. Aunt Waka brings her pride in their Japanese heritage with her and instills that pride in all her family members. The whole family comes under racial attack when a commercial laundry store tries to run her mother’s at home laundry business into the ground. Her little brother’s dog is even killed by the owner of this laundry store. Rinko’s father and their family friend stand up to the owner of that laundry store, and Rinko knows she and her family will never be the same after Aunt Waka’s visit.
This would be an excellent book for the middle school children I teach to read. It brings to light the hardships people from different racial backgrounds face. It puts you in their shoes, and you understand the pain they have to endure in situations such as these. The lesson is one that can be learned even on smaller scale situations; kids are often ridiculed by other kids for a lot less than the color of their skin.
This book reminds me of when I was in grade school. My father worked in the Peabody mines and was laid off one year. Because of that, my twin brother and I received free lunches. I thought that was the singularly most humiliating experience ever going thru that line and having to tell the lunch lady, “Free!” Of course, it seemed like she could never hear me, and I always knew the whole cafeteria would hear me yell free lunch. It was embarrassing to me because kids who received free lunch were always seen as a lower status than kids who paid. Now, I know there is nothing that I should have been ashamed of. But, I still feel very appreciative of the new systems in school cafeteria’s where you punch in a lunch number regardless of whether you’re “free” or you pay for that lunch.