Home is where your Heart is.......

In the 1994 Caldecott Medal-winning book Grandfather’s Journey, author Allen Say talks about the “cross-cultural experience” of his family. This book beautifully captures the love and yearning that immigrants have for two countries that they call home. Allen Say’s Japanese grandfather visited America as a young man and fell in love with this country.  He explores this foreign land, meets with diverse people, and loses his heart to the “New World.” After his travels, he goes back to his village in Japan and gets married, but his heart yearns for America. So he decides to come back. Years pass by, and experiencing his daughter’s childhood reminds him of his childhood in Japan. He decides to return to Japan, and he remains there through very tough times. He always wanted to come back and visit America, but his wish remained unfulfilled. Decades later, like his grandfather, the author embarks on a journey to the American shores and decides to call it home. Like his grandfather, there are moments when he yearns for the country of his childhood, and so he visits Japan to “still the longing” in his heart.

  The author states that “when I am in one country, I am homesick for the other,” and I completely identify with the sentiment behind those lines. As an immigrant myself, I love and appreciate the country that I live in right now, but my heart also yearns for the country of my childhood. Just like the author, when the longing becomes too strong to ignore, I go back home and soothe my soul with the familiar sights and sounds of my childhood. I think that through this book the author also wants to convey the message that it is okay to love two countries equally without carrying the guilt of being disloyal. I think that the emotions expressed in the book are universal and the theme is thought-provoking. Through simple narrative sentences, the author is able to weave a beautiful tale about the immigrant experience and the ways that an immigrant tries to build a bridge between the two countries that he calls home.

Illustrations are an integral part of the fabric of this book. They give a visual representation of the sentences written on each page.The author himself does the illustrations in this book. The text in the book accompanies exquisitely composed watercolor paintings to convey Say's family history. The muted color tones used in the illustrations give the impression of a much-cherished and carefully preserved family album. All the illustrations have a snapshot kind of quality, there is no movement in the paintings, and they are like family portraits that we all have in our homes. The author makes use of representational art to depict realistic portrayal of characters and events. The subdued colors used in the portraits offer them with a sense of serenity. Our eyes are drawn towards the illustrations before the text, and that I think is intentional. The pictures extend the meaning of the subsequent text and add more understanding and depth to it. He also uses traditional clothing in the paintings to differentiate between the two countries and their culture.The illustrations are artistically excellent and compliment the text of the book.