Mei Li
by Thomas Handforth
Summary
A spirited girl named Mei Li sets out with her older brother San Yu for the New Year fair in a walled city in northern China, determined to see everything he has described and to test what a fortune teller might say about her own future rather than stay safely at home. Thomas Handforth drew on years he spent living in China, filling the book with crowded market stalls, kite sellers, acrobats and the noise of a single very long day, all rendered in bold black and white pictures rather than color. Mei Li pushes her way into experiences usually reserved for boys, racing a pony, watching a puppet show, bargaining at a stall, and the book treats her curiosity and nerve as ordinary rather than remarkable, which was itself an unusual choice for an American picture book of 1938.
The lithographs carry more of the story than the text does; Handforth's lines are loose and confident, closer to quick sketching than to careful outline, and the crowded compositions reward a slow look on each page rather than a quick turn to the next. Read aloud, it moves briskly, following Mei Li from one fair attraction to the next with little pause for reflection, and it suits a preschool or early elementary audience more for the pictures' energy than for any complexity in the plot. Mei Li is also notable as one of the first widely read American picture books built around a Chinese child as its central character, drawn from Handforth's own years living in Peking in the 1930s.
Historical Context & Significance
Thomas Handforth won the second Caldecott Medal in 1939 for Mei Li, published by Doubleday in 1938. That year's runners up were James Daugherty's Andy and the Lion, Clare Turlay Newberry's Barkis, Laura Adams Armer's The Forest Pool, Wanda Gág's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Robert Lawson's Wee Gillis.
Handforth, born in Tacoma, Washington in 1897, served in France during the First World War before training at L'École des Beaux Arts and then living for extended periods in Paris, India, North Africa, Mexico and China, experience that made him, by the time Mei Li appeared, a recognized authority on Asian art in American illustration circles. He died in 1948, less than a decade after the medal, and Mei Li remains the book he is remembered for; his other illustrated titles, including Sidonie and Tranquilina's Paradise, never approached its readership or its place in Caldecott history.