From a Bhutanese Farm to Small-Town America: A Folktale

Journeys with Its Tellers

Terry Farish

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, Volume 52, Number

4, 2014, pp. 134-138 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bkb.2014.0140

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/557407

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
 From a Bhutanese Farm to
A Folktale Journeys with Its Tellers
Small-Town America:

A
book was created in an ESOL classroom of adult Nepali-
speaking refugees from Bhutan newly settled in a small
New Hampshire town in the U.S. The book was a tale told
by one of the students about a magic pumpkin who married the
king’s daughter, and when the pumpkin fell from a mango tree his
shell cracked and out stepped a handsome prince. Students roared
with laughter when they heard it. The story built community and
delight in the classroom and served as a bridge to the wider commu-
nity that was the new home for hundreds of families from Bhutan.
by Terry Farish The creators were an ESOL teacher and many storytellers and illus-
trators: her students. A folklorist, a book designer and I, a writer
and literacy program director, supported the work of the class
Even though we laughed and painted and danced and sang and
drank sweet chai tea, we also could simply call this project to create
a bilingual folktale, a practice of listening. And stories did indeed
unfold in class sessions devoted to storytelling. We thought it would
take time to cultivate a distant memory of a story heard in child-
hood, but it did not. Given the floor, student after student told us
long elaborate stories heard on the farms where they were born. One
Terry Farish is a writer for children and
young adults. She wrote The Good Braider, teller explained that stories lasted as long as the work at hand, or as
an American Library Association Best long as the walk on the road to get home. If work in the cardamom
Book for Young Adults, after years of
collecting oral histories among southern
fields was not done, he said, the teller kept telling, thickening the
Sudanese families in Portland, Maine. plot, or weaving in a whole new story line.
Her picture book The Alleyway about a
Dominican-American boy will be published
All the students in the class were parents and many were grand-
in 2015. parents. Many grew up on the farms in Bhutan where they were
© 2014 by Bookbird, Inc.
 From a Bhutanese Farm to Small-Town America

born, herding livestock and working in cardamom or rice fields. Many

had not had a chance to go to school. A grandmother of four told us
that as a child she tended cows and goats, and although she didn’t
have books, her father told her many stories, which she remembered in
detail. She told us her favorite story her father had told her, The Story of
a Pumpkin which became the project’s first book. She had told the story
to her elders in Beldangi 2, the refugee camp where she lived in Nepal
for 18 years, and now in her English classroom in the U.S.
Early on we chose to cultivate the telling of folktales as opposed to
stories of leaving home, or stories of remembered loss. These Nepali-
speaking Hindu families were exiled from their homes in Bhutan and
lost their farms, land, and animals. Our goals in inviting students to
remember folktales were many. We wanted to create a bilingual text
to honor the story told in Nepali and to offer it in English to support
English language learners. Supporting family literacy was a second
major goal, and we wanted to create a rollicking tale for children to
enjoy and to learn about the culture of the home their elders cherish.
And third, we wanted to make a link, through story, among long-term
residents and the families who are newcomers from Bhutan in order to
build understanding and lessen the newcomer’s isolation.
We found that benefits of the project came not just from the final
book but also from the process of creating it. The following is a sketch
of our journey:
Vision for the book: We wanted to make a book we could give to
libraries and schools in the area and other organizations working espe-
cially with Nepali speaking refugees, the largest group of refugees in the
state. We decided to work with a local printer to create a single folk tale
in a trade book format.
Funding a folktale project: The New Hampshire Humanities
Council, working in collaboration with ESOL teachers and consultants,
directed the project. We wrote grants to individual funders, businesses,
and organizations interested in supporting literacy projects. We were
able to raise funds to pay honorariums to Hari Tiwari, the grandmother
who told the selected story, Dal Rai, the illustrator, and other contribu-
tors as well as for the book’s printing. Upon publication of the book, we
hosted a public event to which we invited people from many cultures
and communities and where funders were honored.
Creative ownership: We created an editorial committee that oversaw
the steps of our work. The committee was made up of Bhutanese educa-
tors and artists, a book designer, a writer/ project director, a folklorist,
and ESOL teachers. We wrote job descriptions for committee members.
We learned in this committee’s first meeting that the cultural expecta-
tion of stories in Bhutan is that they teach a lesson, and, indeed, all the
stories we heard met this expectation.
Finding a common language for stories: The Bhutanese people in
the class did not speak English and neither the teacher nor other English-
speaking contributors spoke Nepali. We told stories in our story-telling
sessions with the support of a Nepali-English interpreter. Tellers paused
IBBY.ORG 52.4 – 2014 | 135
From a Bhutanese Farm to Small-Town America

in the storytelling so that the interpreter could retell in English, or if

the story was in English, to interpret in Nepali. The folklorist, Dr. Jo
Radner, instructed the interpreter to present a word-for-word interpre-
tation. We made audio recordings of each session including all stories in
both Nepali and English.
A lesson is generating folktales: Radner invited people to remember
stories about their grandparents, but few people responded. We found
that the prompt to remember grandparents caused people to remember
the death of a grandparent and they spoke of an unhappy memory. The
next time, she invited people to remember something fun they did as a
child. This prompted stories of games, songs, and dances. Women in the
class gathered during break, remembering a song they used to sing when
they went to collect firewood. Students began to remember riddles,
and they offered riddles one after the other, which the interpreter told
us in English, but they made no sense. The interpreter
laughed. “You see,” he said, “the joke is in our culture.
It does not translate.” The students loved stumping us.
Radner told a story she remembered from her childhood.
She asked if anyone wanted to tell a story they heard as
a child. Everyone had a story to tell, pausing only briefly
as the story came back to them from over the years. We
heard stories of daily life, relationships between men
and woman, greed, revenge, tricksters, and sorrow. The
interpreter became invisible. It was as if the storytellers
were speaking directly to us English speakers. The
students’ individual lives opened through their stories
and we were their students as we listened.
Selection of story: The editorial committee selected
the tale “The Story of a Pumpkin” to publish from
about a dozen recorded stories. Our plan was that at the
culminating event, many of the class members who told
stories in class would come together once more and tells their stories
to the wider community that would include their own children and
grandchildren.
Illustration: Bhutanese community members recognized one young
man as the artist among them. The Committee and designer suggested
illustrations for the book, and we also contracted with other Bhutanese
illustrators to contribute images we needed. The book designer, Susan
Kapuscinski Gaylord, described another layer of the value of our process
in creating an illustrated tale. She said, “The illustrator brought us a
watercolor painting and several drawings. Many of the refugees have
only memories of their homeland and his pictures gave them visual
reminders of the life they left behind. A picture of an ox in a field with
a basket muzzling its mouth sparked a lively discussion of farming and
basket weaving.” Later, the designer scanned the wedding sari of an
editorial committee member, as well as other fabric that families had
brought from Nepal. The designer used the fabric scans as well as scans
of handmade paper from Bhutan in the design of the book.
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 From a Bhutanese Farm to Small-Town America

Writing the text of an oral story: The word-for-word interpretation

in English of the tale was extremely important to us. I adapted those
words for the English version of the text. In the class we sorted out
cultural questions. Hari Tiwari gave us clarifications: “Where did the
100 elephants come from? What did the young wife wear under her
sari? Was that a lullaby the wife spoke to the animals when she returned
in the night? What exactly was the punishment the king ordered?” The
recording of Tiwari’s first telling of the story in Nepali was the source
for the transcriber of the story for the published text. Nepali comes in
many fonts and in consultation with the editorial committee and several
classes of Bhutanese students, we settled on Preeti font, one that students
said they were familiar with in books from India.
One of the last great tasks was to assure the
accuracy of the Nepali text in the book. One of
our proofreaders, who was in a high level ESOL
class, kept shaking his head, laughing, almost
crying when he read the story in Nepali. He said
the printed story in Nepali was in the simple
language of a country tale. This was an endorse-
ment of the work. This was our goal. We knew
this was the way the storyteller as a child heard
it from her father, a farmer and herdsman, and
the transcriber had written the tale with this
authenticity.
The book is now published. In public libraries in the state, librarians
share the tale of new arrivals from Bhutan in library story programs.
And the book has been added to immigration units in elementary and
middle schools. One middle school class made up of new arrival refu-
gees themselves read The Story of a Pumpkin and wrote their own adap-
tations of the tale. They also listened to stories from their parents and
grandparents in the language they spoke at home, and then retold the
tales in English for their classmates.
A reviewer in the Concord Monitor wrote these words about the book.
They spoke to our goals of sharing the story of a culture:

“The Story of a Pumpkin is most definitely not just the story of

a pumpkin. It’s a story of national heritage, rooted deep in
the farmlands of Bhutan and passed down from generation to
generation. It’s a story of growth and change, written in both
the native language of Bhutanese refugees and the language
they are struggling daily to learn. And it’s a story of honoring
tradition, designed to link these refugees’ children to the quickly
fading memories of their homeland.”

One afternoon when I was in the home of the family of Narad Adhikari,
the transcriber, I asked his children about the stories their grandpar-
ents told them. They explained to me that they don’t listen to stories.
In the U.S., no one tells stories, they said. They had never heard The
IBBY.ORG 52.4 – 2014 | 137
FROM A BHUtAneSe FARM tO SMAll-tOWn AMeRIcA

Story of a Pumpkin. But their elders had. When Note

one grandfather heard the story in the printed Photos used with permission.
book, he scratched his head, pondered, and then
a smile lit his face. “Oh, yes, I know this story.” Works Cited
Then he told it with his own twist as his four-year
old grandson listened in wonder: the story of a Children’s Books
pumpkin who wins a princess for his bride and tiwari, Hari, The Story of a Pumpkin. Illus. dal
magically is transformed into a handsome man. Rai. concord, nH: new Hampshire Hu-
now the grandson knows the story and tells it to manities council, 2013. Print.
all who will listen.

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