Book Review: The Green Ginger Jar

Title: The Green Ginger Jar

Author: Clara Ingram Judson

Date: 1949

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

ISBN: none

Length: 211 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Paul Brown

Quote: “‘What have I done?’ she asked herself in a panic. ‘I don’t know whether that jar is valuable or not.’”

In the 1940s and 1950s, Clara Ingram Judson wrote a whole series of novels aimed at elementary school readers and based on the history of various ethnic groups in the United States. The Green Ginger Jar was her story about Chicago’s Chinatown—already an historical work since, although it was published in 1949, it’s set in 1935, at which time the children are required to go to school only until they’re fourteen, and they dodge streetcars on the way to Shirley Temple movies, and Lu’s big secret from the other boys is his part-time job (or even jobs) and his secret dream of saving money and going to college.

Aimei (or Amy) Chen, wanting to make an impression, “vex Old Grandmother, and get rid of one of the too-numerous things that had to be dusted every day” “in one clever stroke,” offers an old jar to a casual visitor. If her new acquaintance, Joanne, had been a Chinese middle school girl, she would have known not to ask whether Aimei was allowed to give her the jar, but to enjoy the jar for a few weeks and then re-gift it back to Aimei, and no harm would have been done. She knows neither of these things...and Old Grandmother punishes Aimei with a vague hint that, although Aimei and her brother Lu research the value of antique jars and assure Grandmother that the green jar is not one of the valuable types, there might be something special about it after all. This sends the children on a search through Chinatown, where they learn lots of historical information, eat Chinese meals a little more exotic than what readers have probably eaten on the shopping mall, persuade the elders that Lu and his buddies deserve a clubhouse and it won’t do any harm for Aimei to try curling her hair, and, of course, after plenty of adventures, find the jar.

In the first chapter, Lu and Aimei have rescued a stray dog who was hit by a car. How the dog rescues Lu and Aimei, in return, from two different scrapes “in one clever stroke,” may be a little too convenient a plot twist to give the book a happy ending, but the thinking at this historical period was that, if a novel meant for children moralized a bit about kindness to animals, it couldn’t do any harm.

Did actual children enjoy these books? I’m not sure why they wouldn’t, but the physical evidence in my hands shows that this book sat on the shelves in my home town library from 1958 to 2008 and was not checked out after 1970. Why didn’t I read it, as a little bookworm? I remember seeing it on the shelf several times and, each time, choosing to read some other book first. I read it for the first time after buying it at a used book sale. I think now that I might have enjoyed it at age ten.

Recommended to middle school readers in search of something to read on the bus, and to adults who don’t mind absorbing a few quick facts about Chicago and Chinatown. Only a few—the author’s period-appropriate intention was not to write a textbook, but (theoretically) to whet the child reader’s appetite for the few carefully selected, simply explained facts that might be in their school textbooks. As she reassures readers in the foreword, there are only a few Chinese words in the story, and they’ll be easy to say when the child has to read aloud to the class, because they’re spelled just the way they sound. Today’s child readers, who may be taking courses in Conversational Chinese, should get a good laugh by sharing these words with the class.