The Paper Boat: A Refugee Story is another picture book by Thao Lam, this one from 2020.
A few days ago I reviewed The Line in the Sand, and, a bit earlier, Everybelly. Everybelly I loved. The Line in the Sand…has good illustrations, but didn’t move me the same way. Both of these earlier books tackle serious subjects, but in ways that lighten them somewhat. For example, The Line in the Sand explores people who conflict with one another, and who then find a way to get along. They just happen to be oddly shaped creatures on the beach.
The Paper Boat: A Refugee Story is different. It tackles a serious subject, or several of them, seriously. As Thao Lam explains in the author’s note at the end of the book, their family fled conflict in Vietnam along with hundreds of thousands other Vietnamese. Their family risked days on a fishing boat, then spent five months in a refugee camp in Malaysia. They eventually resettled in Canada.
The Paper Boat: A Refugee Story, then, is a personal story, a family story, a national story, and a global story. It is a story about upheaval, change, and risk…and, except for mock ups of newspapers from the sixties and seventies inside the front cover, Thao Lam tells this complex story without words. The refugees are at times presented as human, but other times are shown as ants in a paper boat. This does a great job of showing how small they were in relation to the forces at play, as well as the risks they navigate.
They pass through times of isolation, times of overcrowding, times when the elements threaten them, and times of hunger
They survive, and the end of book, only humans are shown.
I respect this book, and am humbled by the experience. The stylized images were evocative. I was moved by individual sections of the book…but think the book a whole will require outside research for it to work for kids, and adults reading it need to expect to explain a lot of things.
