In my younger days, I didn’t have decent clothes and shoes. Our parents would only buy us new ones every Christmas because we could no longer wear the ones we had bought the other year. We always wore them on different special occasions like when we had to visit our mom’s father in a far province or when we wanted to visit our other relatives in the other cities. But I started to be kind of ashamed of my dress when I reached the puberty stage, when I began to have a circle of friends. It was the time when I came to understand that your economic, social, and even aesthetic status was also based on the quality of the clothes you wear. Is not that completely absurd?
That feeling was the same as the story of this book. The children are fascinated at a girl clad in a glamorous and luxurious dress. They consider her rich because her family can afford that kind of dress. They even find her beautiful because it is her dress, cap, and gloves that beautify her physical shortcomings. Out of their innocence and immature perception that materials like fancy clothes are the bases of a higher social, economic, and aesthetic status, that girl becomes the center of the universe as if she is the most important child everyone should place on a pedestal. [ It is making me puke.]
But behind them, a girl named Wanda Petronski, of Polish descent, is the antithesis. She is avoided like the plague because her parents are poor immigrants living in a ghost-like village where the houses are dilapidated and ramshackle and by which children are scared to pass. She wears out the same dresses . She barely talks because she knows that her words are trivial by comparison. She knows that she will be the butt of their mock surprise if she says something to catch their interest, especially like when she says that she has hundred dresses. In short, she is the least important student who sticks out like a sore thumb whom every child should shrug off.
That is social bullying.
The story for me was a kind of tricky. I had predicted that the ending would be a big revelation. I thought Wanda meant business that she had hundred dresses. I thought that her family could be rich and that she just didn’t want to wear her hundred dresses for some reasons. Then, her friends would eat their words after finding out that she was not showing off after all. What a gullible reader I was!
But I wish the ending were like that. Wanda would have the last laugh. Her bully classmates would be ashamed of their mocking her. They would apologize to her and be friends. Rather, those hundred dresses turned out to be her personal designs for each of her classmate. (Now, I’m a spoiler. Sorry.)
After reading this, it occurred to me that bullying usually happens in early school in a sense that children are too young to pick on other children. Well, we can understand why it happens so in the context of child psychology. Thus, I believe that in order for children not to be bullies and have antisocial behavior until later age, parents should instill in them at their young age the spirit of camaraderie and being kind and respectful to people. Most importantly, parents should never be lacking in loving their children. In that case, I assume that it’s not Wanda’s parents who are at fault, but her classmates’ parents are.
I believe that this book not only teaches children about bullying on the basis of race and social, economic, and aesthetic status but also about the simple fact that making friends is not based on “fabricated high social expectations.” However, it is parents who must inculcate that in them since children are too cognitively immature to gain insights into their complicated world.
This book was published in 1944, and is still very relevant today and even in the future. Bullying is still a cultural meme as long as people, particularly parents, still aren’t educated about it. So, it should be one of the books elementary school teachers should read to their students and parents to their kids.
My Rating: 3/ 5 stars
A Book Bore in Timbuktu 