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This is a book I liked as a child, which I lost and then re-read as an adult.
I have to confess that I have never been a fan of Daniel Pinkwater. His books are just too surreal for my taste, and I don’t find them that funny. This is true of lots of widely-loved writers, most notably Douglas Adams. It’s not a criticism of them to say that I fail to appreciate their work.
However, while attempting to track down one of my missing childhood books, I found to my surprise that it was written by none other than Daniel Pinkwater, under the name of Manus Pinkwater. The few reviews I found noted that it was an early, non-representative work. “Not funny,” one said disapprovingly. This is probably why I liked it— not that it’s not funny, but that it’s not like his other books. It’s not surrealism, but magic realism: fantasy governed by whether the magic makes emotional sense, not by logical explanations.
Donald Chen, aka Chen Chi Wing, is the only Chinese boy in his school in New York City in an unspecified time in which it’s possible for a poor kid to buy the first edition of “Superman,” but it’s old and used. His horrible teacher is horrible to him, and while he’s not bullied, exactly, he doesn’t have friends either. He gets singled out for being poor, his mother is in the hospital (she doesn’t die, FYI), and he’s lonely.
After a particularly bruising experience, he starts packing comics into his school bag, then climbing the girders of the George Washington Bridge and reading comics all day. One day a winged man lands on the bridge beside him, not quite seeming to register him, like the pigeons who sometimes do the same thing. He’s clearly some sort of superhero, but described more with the language of fantasy. And he’s Chinese.
This atmospheric fantasy mixes precise details of ordinary life with small but very sense-of-wonder bits of fantasy. The magic is never explained, but is clearly there to help out the hero: both to give him a better time in his everyday life (his new teacher appreciates his art, which is inspired by scenes of ancient China that Wingman showed him), and to let him explore his culture in a way he wasn’t otherwise getting to do. But Wingman seems to have a life of his own, which has only brushed against that of a lonely little boy; at the end, they’re spending less time together, but still existing in the same world.
It’s a lovely little book, interspersed with cartoons. There’s some aspects that feel dated, but most of it still works. The deliberate timelessness helps. Even apart from that I identified with being the only person of my race in the school, I can see why it stuck in my memory for 30 years.
Wingman
I have to confess that I have never been a fan of Daniel Pinkwater. His books are just too surreal for my taste, and I don’t find them that funny. This is true of lots of widely-loved writers, most notably Douglas Adams. It’s not a criticism of them to say that I fail to appreciate their work.
However, while attempting to track down one of my missing childhood books, I found to my surprise that it was written by none other than Daniel Pinkwater, under the name of Manus Pinkwater. The few reviews I found noted that it was an early, non-representative work. “Not funny,” one said disapprovingly. This is probably why I liked it— not that it’s not funny, but that it’s not like his other books. It’s not surrealism, but magic realism: fantasy governed by whether the magic makes emotional sense, not by logical explanations.
Donald Chen, aka Chen Chi Wing, is the only Chinese boy in his school in New York City in an unspecified time in which it’s possible for a poor kid to buy the first edition of “Superman,” but it’s old and used. His horrible teacher is horrible to him, and while he’s not bullied, exactly, he doesn’t have friends either. He gets singled out for being poor, his mother is in the hospital (she doesn’t die, FYI), and he’s lonely.
After a particularly bruising experience, he starts packing comics into his school bag, then climbing the girders of the George Washington Bridge and reading comics all day. One day a winged man lands on the bridge beside him, not quite seeming to register him, like the pigeons who sometimes do the same thing. He’s clearly some sort of superhero, but described more with the language of fantasy. And he’s Chinese.
This atmospheric fantasy mixes precise details of ordinary life with small but very sense-of-wonder bits of fantasy. The magic is never explained, but is clearly there to help out the hero: both to give him a better time in his everyday life (his new teacher appreciates his art, which is inspired by scenes of ancient China that Wingman showed him), and to let him explore his culture in a way he wasn’t otherwise getting to do. But Wingman seems to have a life of his own, which has only brushed against that of a lonely little boy; at the end, they’re spending less time together, but still existing in the same world.
It’s a lovely little book, interspersed with cartoons. There’s some aspects that feel dated, but most of it still works. The deliberate timelessness helps. Even apart from that I identified with being the only person of my race in the school, I can see why it stuck in my memory for 30 years.
Wingman
