Pistes d'exploration

Discuss Grandfather's journey and how he missed the places that he visited. What would you miss about your homeland if you had to leave?

Write a descriptive paragraph explaining all the wonderful things about where you live right now.

Map the journey of the grandfather’s life, using a graphic organizer. Note what he saw or learned at each of the places.

Discuss what you think was the biggest lesson that the grandfather learned while traveling.

As a class or in small groups, sequence Grandfather’s journey.

Discuss changes in your life (places, people).

Create your own Journey Journal. Use the book as a model.

Using different colours of yarn, plot everyone’s journey on a common map. Discuss the migrations.

The Arrival, Ghost Train, Is This Panama?: A Migration Story, TheKids Book of Canadian Immigration

Mots-clés

Picture book , emigration , grandfathers , immigration , intergenerational relationships , journeys , memories , travel

Commentaire descriptif

This story manages, with only a couple of lines per page, to convey a saga-like theme of adventure, discovery and bi-cultural living—all told in a haunting and elegiac tone. As a young man, Grandfather travels from Japan to the United States. Simple, poetic language describes wondrous lands and adventures. From “huge cities of factories and tall buildings … to towering mountains and rivers clear as the sky…, he shook hands with black men and white men, with yellow men and red men.” Sensitive watercolour illustrations realistically portray people and settings, ranging from frontier America to post-World War II Japan. Grandfather and his young family sit in a park by San Francisco Bay. Later, children gather on the rubble of a bombed city in Japan. Later still, a young boy in modern clothing stands behind Grandfather in his kimono: “He longed to see California one more time. He never did.” Many young readers in Canada will relate to the perception of belonging to two cultures. They may also recognize the feeling, “the moment I am in one country, I am homesick for the other.” This quiet book, full of still images, evokes both the richness and the challenge of crossing over cultures.