Dumping Days and Dumpling Nights

One of the best songs ever!  Good ole Freddy Fender.  There probably aren't a lot of blog posts out there that link Fender to Grace Lin, but I bet this isn't the only on.  Dumpling Days is the latest in the series about Pacy "Grace" Lin, from Upstate NY.  A Taiwanese-American, in this book Pacy and her family spend a month in Taiwan.  At first Pacy doesn't want to go, but by the end of the trip, she really feels a love for Taiwan.  Like the previous books in the series, The Year of the Rat and The Year of the Dog, this book is packed with really cool information about Taiwanese and Chinese traditions and it also just a plain old great growing up story full of humor and truth for people of any background.  I now understand the difference between Taiwan (officially known as the Republic of China) and the People's Republic of China.  Forty years old and only learning this now?  Shame on me.  Seriously.  That is kind of embarrassing.
It was cool to learn about Ghost Month and all of the different kinds of Asian dumplings.  But there are also very real lessons in here, like how to live with the ghosts of our past, how to live in two worlds, how life isn't black and white.  Great, great, great, great book.  I hope there are more to come.