This is a story about stories. This is a story about gods and men.
Thirteen-year-old Chinese girl Mei introduces the reader to her world through this powerful thematic assertion. Gods in this sense mean mythology, not religious doctrine. The story is heavily indebted to the tales of the distinctively American folk hero, Paul Bunyan. Mei is a naturally gifted storyteller; like a young female Chinese Spielberg before the invention of movies. She spins yarns that captivate an admittedly captive audience—kids of loggers in the late 1800’s—and among her most popular tales are those that reinvent the legend of Paul Bunyan and appropriate it through her own particular cultural perspective. That Paul and Auntie Po both deliver similar thematic messages strongly hints that myth is a form of storytelling which is not too easily held hostage to nationalistic ideals.
I make the best pies for miles. Well, we’re the only logging camp for at least forty miles.
Mei’s talents stretch beyond merely being a storyteller, however. She is a young woman who is both artist and artisan. She can whip up a pie with same ease and flair with which she whips up a yarn to engage an audience. Those stories are not just narratives, however, with no purpose. Again, like Spielberg, she is able to couch some political messages behind an exciting adventure story. Much like this book itself which is much more than a simple story of logging camps and Chinese workers. What is especially felicitous about the book is the way that Mei’s talent for pie making winds up also being a political weapon of great motivational consequence.
“Well, it turns out the bumblebees took a liking to the mosquitoes…I mean, they really, really liked each other…They mated and produced a terrifying hybrid of mosquito bees.”
One of the adventures of Auntie Po that Mei shares with attentive audience is a story about the only kind of mosquitoes that would actually bother a woman of such prodigious size as Auntie Po. Her plan is based on a sound strategic concept: if you can’t beat them, entice them into a war with an enemy that can. Things don’t turn out quite as planned, however, and instead of a battle to death over shared hate, a shared love produces a new species. It is a cute twist that leads to a silly punchline evolutionary hybridization producing a creature that “had mouth-stingers AND butt-stingers.” Beneath the silliness, however, the twist of the story is subtle commentary on real life: Mei’s friendship with the daughter of the foreman of the camp which may be reaching beyond the platonic toward dreams, at least, of a much more forbidden possibility.
