Episode #115: Did your parents tell you stories when you were young?-with Sayantani DasGupta
Welcome to another special Kids Ask Authors episode! We are joined by author Sayantani DasGupta and she is answering this wonderful kid question: “Did your parents tell you stories when you were young?”
TRANSCRIPTS:
Grace Lin: Hello. I am Grace Lin, children's book author and illustrator of many books, including the middle grade novel, When the Sea Turned to Silver, and the picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star. Today, I am here with Sayantani DasGupta, the author of Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond middle grade trilogy as well as Force of Fire. Hi, Sayantani.
Sayantani DasGupta: Hi, Grace. Thank you so much for having me.
Grace Lin: Thank you so much for joining us today. Are you ready for today's kid question?
Sayantani DasGupta: I am excited and ready.
Grace Lin: Okay. Today's kid question is from a person named Summer. And Summer asks.
Summer: Did your parents tell you stories when you were young?
Grace Lin: Did your parents tell you stories when you were young?
Sayantani DasGupta: Oh, Summer, I love this question. Thank you so much for asking. Yes. My parents, like most parents and guardians and grandparents and adults in young people's lives, told me so many stories. And because my parents were immigrants, they were immigrants from India to the US, they told me stories that were like a bridge. They were like a connection made of memories back to India. They would tell me stories that they had heard when they were young, and many of these stories I would hear again in a slightly different version when I would visit my grandparents on my long summer vacations to India.
Sayantani DasGupta: And some of these stories that my parents told me, and again, my grandparents would retell me in other ways, were from this oral history or this oral tradition in Bengal, these oral stories called Thakurmar Jhuli. And Thakurmar Jhuli, which is a phrase in Bengali, basically means grandmother's satchel. So the idea is that all these folk tales and these folk stories that have been passed on through the generations orally, they're like these precious treasures that your grandma carries in a sack with her and passes out to you.
Sayantani DasGupta: And these were stories about princes and princesses saving the day. And they were stories about evil serpent kings, and they were stories about these rhyming, drooling ridiculous, but also scary monsters called Rakkhosh, who would say things like, "Dirty socks and stinky feet. I smell royal human meat," before they chased you, which seems like a giant waste of time, to like make up a whole poem before you chase someone? But that seems to be, in my opinion, a cross-cultural problem.
Sayantani DasGupta: Think about fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Jack and the Beanstalk guy. So these Rakkhosh were these monsters who, like many monsters cross-culturally, wasted a bunch of time making up meter and verse and poetry before they chased you. But I absolutely loved these stories for many, many reasons, one of which was because growing up in the US back in the '70s and '80s, when I was young, I never got to see people who looked like me, immigrant kids or brown kids, starring in books or movies or even pictured on billboards.
Sayantani DasGupta: And after not seeing myself like that, I started to believe, and this is an absolutely false belief, but I believed that maybe if there aren't kids like me being protagonists of stories, maybe somebody like me can't be the hero of a story. And the reason I loved, loved loved these stories that my parents and grandparents told me is that they turned that false assumption on its head. Because these Bengali folk tales were full of kids exactly like me, riding around and being brave and challenging themselves and saving the day. So I absolutely loved these stories.
Grace Lin: Aw, that's so wonderful. It's so interesting because I have so many similar feelings to you and some very similar experiences to you. The same thing about not seeing anybody that looked like me in the media around me, my parents also sharing stories. But the one difference, I have to admit, is that the stories my parents shared with me, I did not like them at all.
Sayantani DasGupta: Why, Grace? Why didn't you like them?
Grace Lin: Because I'm not sure if it was just the stories that my mother decided to share with me, but after reading quite a few Chinese folk tales, there's a lot of Asian folk tales that are very, very melodramatic and very, very sad and very, very ... I didn't like, most of them end badly. They're so sad. And it's so strange. I remember very vividly my mom coming to me when I was nine years old. And she's like, "I want to tell you a beautiful Chinese story."
Grace Lin: And it was this story about this woman who was madly in love with her husband, but her husband was taken away to work on the Great Wall of China. And he was taken away in the summertime time, so she was so worried about him when the winter came. So she walked all the way to the Great Wall of China bringing warm clothes for him. And then when she got there, she found out he had died long ago.
Sayantani DasGupta: Oh, no.
Grace Lin: She was so sad that her tears broke down part of the wall. And the emperor was so mad to hear a woman had broken daughter down part of his wall that he went to go punish her. But he saw she was so beautiful that he wanted to marry her. And she said, "Only if you give my husband a burial." And so he gives her husband a burial and then is like, "Okay, now you have to marry me." And she says, "Never." And she kills herself. And that was the end of the story. And she's like, "Isn't that beautiful?" My mom said, "Isn't that beautiful?" And I was like, "No, that's absolutely terrible. That's a horrible story. I don't like it at all."
Sayantani DasGupta: Oh, no. What I love about oral stories is you can change them. You can change the ending. You can make it appropriate to context because unlike, I think, more spiritual stories or stories about different sorts of significance in a cultural context, I think oral stories have always been changed by grandmas and parents. Maybe to prove a point.
Sayantani DasGupta: My grandma would always ... And because I've heard these stories from my parents, I knew the way they were supposed to end, but she would change them all the time to include a lesson for whatever cousin had been naughty that day and had fought with their sibling. And so the story became much more emphasis on, don't fight with your sibling. And so I knew, even from a young age, that she was playing fast with these stories.
Sayantani DasGupta: And in a sense, it gave me the courage to, as an immigrant daughter, take these stories and make them mine. Had I not known that oral stories always change from teller to teller, and that's a part of what they are. If I didn't know that, or if I hadn't been drawing from Bengali folk tales in writing the Kiranmala series, if they'd been other sorts of more formal stories or something, I don't think I would feel brave enough to play with them and be silly with them.
Sayantani DasGupta: The other thing is my grandmother had a fantastic sense of humor, and so she was always inserting silly jokes into these stories too. But I don't think I'd have the courage to tell silly jokes and riddles and take my character from this Bengali folk tale and put her in a kurta and combat boots and stick her in New Jersey. I don't think I'd have the courage to play that fast and loose with these stories if I hadn't already seen my elders doing that and being a little free with them.
Grace Lin: Yeah. And I think that's the beauty of these folk tales. That's why, and I actually took that story that I told you with the Great Wall. And I used it in one of my books, When the Sea Turned to Silver, and I changed it. I changed parts of it, like you said, because every story changes with the teller. And that's the way that I fell in love with these stories after all is when I realized, oh, wait, I can change them to the way I think that they deserve to be told.
Sayantani DasGupta: And that doesn't take away anything. It's just you're adding to this rich cadre, this rich of this story being retold and retold and retold. And that's the beauty to me.
Grace Lin: I agree. Definitely. And I think that it makes these stories more alive in some ways, because it keeps them around. If you have the same story told exactly the same way as it was 300 years ago, that's just not as accessible. That's what keeps these stories alive is the fact that they change and adapt for each generation.
Sayantani DasGupta: Absolutely. And I think that's the beauty of these intergenerational stories. They'll adapt and change teller to teller. Suddenly you see a cell phone right at the [inaudible 00:09:51] of the story. They'll adapt for the times as well, and that's exactly their lasting power. I couldn't agree with you more.
Grace Lin: Yeah. So anyway, thank you so much, Sayantani, for answering this great question. That was really great. And thank you so much, Summer, for asking it.
Sayantani DasGupta: Well, thank you for having me, Grace. And Summer, thanks again for your great question.
Grace Lin: Bye.
Sayantani DasGupta: Bye.
Today’s Kid Book Club book review: Today’s review comes from Zahra. Zahra is reviewing, The Serpent’s Secret by Sayantani DasGupta.
My very favorite book, and the one I would like to talk about, is The Serpent's Secret by Sayantani Dasgupta. It is the first book in the Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond series. It is about a girl named Kiranmala whose parents have suddenly vanished on the day of her 12th birthday. A monster called a rakkhosh appears in her house and tries to eat her. To save her parents, Kiranmala must go on a journey with two princes called Lal and Neel. She faces demons and all sorts of magical creatures on her quest to save her parents and the entire world! Not to mention, she discovers she has an actual snake family.
I love to read and reread this book because it is so fantastic and funny. I especially love it because the main character looks like me and she speaks Bengali like me. There are not a lot of books with characters that talk like me and my family. The creatures are from the mythology I know through my mom. I hope more kids read The Serpent'sSecret. I know they will love it as much as I do.
Thank you so much Zahra!
More about today’s authors:
Sayantani DasGupta is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed, Bengali folktale and string theory-inspired Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond books, the first of which—The Serpent’s Secret—was a Bank Street Best Book of the Year, a Booklist Best Middle Grade Novel of the 21st Century, and an EB White Read Aloud Honor Book. She is also the author of She Persisted: Virginia Apgar, a part of Chelsea Clinton’s She Persisted series from Penguin/Philomel, and Force of Fire, an anticolonial and Bengali folktale inspired fantasy set in the Kingdom Beyond multiverse from Scholastic. Her YA debut, Debating Darcy, a multicultural speech and debate feminist reimagining of Pride and Prejudice, comes out in 2022, also from Scholastic. Sayantani is a pediatrician by training, but now teaches at Columbia University. When she’s not writing or reading, Sayantani spends time watching cooking shows with her trilingual children and protecting her black Labrador retriever Khushi from the many things that scare him, including plastic bags. She is a team member of We Need Diverse Books, and can be found online at sayantanidasgupta.com and on Twitter at @sayantani16.
Grace Lin, a NY Times bestselling author/ illustrator, won the Newbery Honor for Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and her picture book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star, was awarded the Caldecott Honor. Grace is an occasional commentator for New England Public Radio , a video essayist for PBS NewsHour (here & here), and the speaker of the popular TEDx talk, The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf. She is the co-host of the podcast Book Friends Forever, a kidlit podcast about friendship and publishing (geared for adults). Find her facebook, instagram , twitter ( @pacylin) or sign up for her author newsletter HERE.
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