(1183) Mother's heart, mother's tree by Fang Sook Ching

This is a Chinese children's book I borrowed from the nearest Sabah Library. It was beautifully illustrated by another lady with the given name of Kwee Fang.

Among the little group of students my son taught on two weeknights, there is a guy whose mother left his dad. It is perfectly natural that that he was hurt and felt abandoned.

In the above book, a little girl's mom made her a cloth heart to represent the mom's unchanging love and care. The pink heart was hung on a tree branch outside the classroom window.

Soon there were eight other hearts made by other mothers of the children in the class. A boy, whose mother has passed away, started to "borrow" different hearts to take home each day by force. That action continually caused lots of tears and unhappiness. The class teacher did not know how to handle the difficult situation. It was wonderful that her grandmother found a solution to the problem. A phone call from the teacher led to the father of the boy in question making a paper heart for hanging on the tree branch.

In the end, even the teacher's grandma made a heart for the teacher to hang on the tree branch. After all, the teacher has no living mum or dad. Her grandma brought her up.

Using this book, I talked about  how we are living in an imperfect world. Of course, the boy in the story lacked a mother compared to his classmates. But look at the teacher, she probably did not even have any memory of her parents, her grandma is all she has.

Yet, while I was resident in Silver City, there was a gun shot incident where a mother was shot in a petrol station. Her 5 year-old daughter who witnessed the killing was so traumatised by the experience that she could not utter a word for 5 long years.

That fateful day, I actually drove past the incident site shortly after the shooting and saw quite a few emergency vehicles. The bullet-ridden Land Cruiser was photographed and came up in the next day's newspaper. A paediatrician who worked in the General Hospital told me that the girl concerned had been meeting with a Government child Psychologist monthly for those years.