Caldecott Medal Contender: Watercress

by Sam Juliano

The Merriam-Webster definition of watercress is as follows:  “a perennial cress (Nasturtium officinale) native to Europe and southwestern Asia that is naturalized in the U.S. and has leaves used especially in salads or as a potherb.”

The physical manifestation of the exotic foodstuff provides the narrative centerpiece of Andrea Wang’s Watercress, but in an expansive sense it embodies love of family, the power of memory and how a simple ritual at the dinner table can shape and redefine life moving forward.  An aching melancholia underscores a story about childhood resistance and the inherent embarrassment one may feel when reminded of a past replete with struggle and little means to get by.  Wang’s descriptive poetry weaves a sustained mood and tone, but also, as attested by the story’s parental figures telling verisimilitude.  The author’s language is so precisely crafted and suffused with emotion, and it potently establishes atmosphere and coaxes sensory immersion through descriptive language and lovely similes.

Wang’s accomplice in this indelible exploration of a family of four’s connection with their past and their acknowledgement that the smallest things in time are often the most meaningful, is Caldecott Honor winning artist Jason Chin, whose list of resplendent works continues to expand with each new outing.  But I dare say Watercress is his supreme masterpiece to date and a textbook example of author-illustrator chemistry, a match forged by common ethnicity and as attested by Chin himself in an afterward, a marked similarity between his own Chinese immigrant Dad and the book’s young female protagonist.  Indeed the matter of feeling different and being excluded is as the artist subsequent notes is universally commonplace when cultures converge.

The dreamlike frontispiece showcasing a cornfield in the heartland, is etched in “yellow ochre,” which Chin states reminded him of old photographs and 1970’s decor.  The red car seen in the distance is frontally amplified on the handsome title page depicting a family slowing down to get a closer look at what appear to be cornstalks.  A close-up of the daughter looking on indifferently through a window of a car dulled and decolorized by the ravages of weather.

We are in the old Pontiac, the red paint faded by years of glinting Ohio sun, pelting rain and biting snow.

The car stops after the be-speckled matriarch, one Wang nonetheless asserts possesses “eyes as sharp as the tip of a dragon’s claw” detects something in the weeds that jogs the memory.  After the father’s eyes widen he and his spouse recognize the the low-lying vegetable as “Watercress!”  They avail themselves of paper bags and a rusty scissors, but just a fleeting moment they long for the country they grew up in.  Chin responds with a sepia-toned canvas of thatched roofs in a waterside location that suggests the Yangtze River.  Unquenchable desire for the old country was a central focus in Allan Say’s Caldecott medal winning Grandfather’s Journey, though in that instance it wasn’t China but Japan.

The children are enlisted to help gather up the watercress, though they first need to strip off their socks and untie their sneakers.  The girl is unnerved by the cold water stinging her feet, and the mud sticking to her toes.  Much like a worker serving a community service sentence picking up garbage alongside a road, the book’s alienated young protagonist ducks her head, mortified that someone passing by might recognize her scavenging for food in the wild.  But her brother, Mom and Dad stay the course:

My parents cut branches of the small plant, long stringy stems with leaves round as coins.

The exasperated girl is none too thrilled at her brother’s behavior, when he positions “roots dripping with dirty water” near her shirt and face, especially as “there are tiny snails clinging to the underside.”  She is chagrined at the weight of the soaked paper bag and half of her is hoping the bag with break and the watercress with fall back into the muck.  Seemingly spent from an assignment she detested, the girl – the point of view narrator of the story – extends her arms to rid herself of the afternoon’s toils.  Wang marvelously connects “soppy,” “sopping,” and “sodden” to denote the lamentable aftermath of the experience, and Chin’s exquisite watercolor farmland tapestry recalls renowned rural painter Andrew Wyeth, whose work evinces formal beauty, but perhaps more significant for this elegiac narrative sturdy emotional currents, symbolic content, and underlying abstraction, the latter accentuated when the girl reveals the original destination of their trip is no longer even remembered.

The fruits of the afternoon’s labor are offered up  in an ornate serving dish, where the makeshift meal is prepared with “garlicky oil” and “sesame seeds.”  Though the dismayed adolescent female noticed the mud and snails are gone, she still doesn’t want to acknowledged an activity she wants to erase from her mind, and she folds her arms in abstinence.  Chin documents the dining table standoff with some bittersweet humor.  The brother facially mocks her resistance, and the parents point out the watercress if both “fresh” and “free.”  But this obstinate adolescent associates “free” with hand-me-down clothes and used roadside furniture, both of which entered her sphere in the past.  The artist offers up vignettes from the time when the family loaded chairs into their trunk and their daughter wore torn dungarees with patches.

Unable to break through to the girl with tangible observations, the mother fetches an old photo of the Chinese family she never speaks about.  She mentions her thin younger brother, telling her daughter he is her uncle.  The implication, though not at first established, is that he was lost tragically, perhaps to famine.  Chin’s most wrenching canvas in response to the words “but it was still not enough” depicts a diminished family suffering unbearable grief in a gloomy rain scene following up on a depiction recalling a childhood petition for more food in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

Finally, the guilt-ridden offspring is repentant as she studies the photo, realizing she is truly ashamed for reprehensible behavior and she indulges in the afternoon’s harvesting.  She detects a “spicy, peppery taste” one tellingly comparable to her Mom’s memories of her home.  In Chin’s tearful scene of conciliation, the unnamed girl, though the afterward makes her identity clear, joins the other three members of her family in the watercress meal, and by so doing forged an indelible memory, that she could one day pass on to her own children.

In another year of children’s picture book excellence, this remarkable collaboration is unparalleled.  The humanism and story of Korean-Americans enduring hardship in rural Arkansas, was told in the 2020 drama film Minari, written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung bears similarities to the Wang-Chin literary work.  One would be hard pressed to fathom the Caldecott committee not being impressed with the gorgeous and deeply emotional art Chin has fashioned for Watercress,  a soulful story he counts as universal.  Art in the tradition of the masters -and that inside cover of watercress being visited by a dragonfly is sublime- would be exceedingly well served by the shiny medal annually awarded by the American Library Association.  Watercress is a masterpiece.

Note:  This is the sixth entry in the 2021 Caldecott Medal Contender series.  The series does not purport to predict what the committee will or should choose, rather it attempts to gauge what the writer feels should be in the running.  In most instances the books that are featured in the series have been touted as contenders in various online round-ups, but for the ones that are not, the inclusions are a humble plea to the committee for consideration.  I am not certain how many reviews will be written in a year maligned by pandemic issues and other commitments.  But I do hope to showcase the picture books I really think should be talked about when determining year-end awards for illustration.