Bamboo People (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bamboo People Elizabeth Bush Perkins, Mitali . Bamboo People. Charlesbridge, 2010. 272p. ISBN 978-1-58089-328-2 $16.95 Ad Gr. 5-7. The career dreams of fifteen-year-old Chiko seem to be over when a group registration session for prospective teachers turns out to be an ambush for abducting new recruits into the Burmese army. The genteelly raised doctor's son is ill prepared to deal with the rigors of army life, and he quickly becomes a target for a sadistic officer. With the aid of Tai, an orphaned street boy who wants only to escape and protect his young sister, Chiko and his group of recruits toughen up and cleverly accomplish all of "Captain Evil's" nearly impossible assignments. Chiko, in turn, [End Page 88] teaches Tai to read and write, a skill which ultimately separates the two young men; Tai is sent back to the city as a clerk, while Chiko is sent, unarmed, on a mission to wipe out a nest of rebelling Karenni, an ethnic group putting up fierce resistance to the ruling Burmese. Chiko steps on a land mine, and as he blacks out, the narration shifts to Tu Reh, a sixteen-year-old Karenni on a mission with his father to resupply rebels hiding in the jungle. They come upon critically wounded Chiko, and Tu Reh, charged by his father to decide how to handle the young prisoner, resists his initial impulse to shoot the enemy. Bringing Chiko back to the refugee camp for treatment, however, calls Tu Reh's loyalties into question among some of the Karenni. Political background is occasionally forced ("Father used to tell me about people like the . . . Karenni. The government is trying to get rid of them and take their land, but they have a right to be a part of our country. After all, they've lived here for centuries"). Tu Reh's narration sometimes takes on the tone of a B-movie: "It's time to act—time to grow up and become a man. A man for the Karenni." Most problematic, though, is the improbable tidying of loose ends, in which all outcomes are far too rosy for even the most optimistic readers to expect in a war story. Still, the political struggles of Myanmar (Perkins explains in an appended note her decision to use the term "Burma") are worth examining, and readers not ready for the harsher detail of boy soldiers in Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone (BCCB 5/07) will find Chiko and Tu Reh's adventures intriguing. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois