Chichi's Magic

In my previous posts, I mainly discuss issues that relate to technology, digital texts and print texts, and teaching, but for this post I would like to tell a short narrative about how the World Wide Web made a small “dream come true.”

It begins really with my mother. My mother was raised in an abusive environment. Her father was a felon and a wife/child abuser, and her mother never tried to stop his abuses. By the time she was eight years old, the family was reduced to living in a van on the side of an abandoned road. After her infant brother died of pneumonia, social services sent her biological male parent to jail and split the four remaining children among family members. In a few weeks the only family life my mother knew was destroyed.

My mother and her next older sister (my Aunt Sandra) were sent to live with their uncle and his wife. While there, she was not physically abused, but she was mentally abused. Constantly reminded that she and her sister were the poor castaways, she never found a stable and loving home environment, and being a precocious youth, she sought comfort in other areas, mainly reading. She often visited the school library and borrowed books to occupy her thoughts. She was particularly fond of one book, Chichi’s Magic, a simple tale of a young boy in love who is turned into a monkey by a witch. Over time, she grew out of such “silly” tales and soon forgot Chichi and his journey, but she never lost her love of reading, a trait that got pasted to both my sister and I.

As the youngest of three, I have never been able to escape “The Baby” label. After my mom and I would drop my older siblings off at school, we would go to breakfast at Grandy’s, a restaurant that seems to exist only in Florida, and then to the library. I was very young when she first mentioned to me “to keep an eye out for a book with a monkey on the cover.” She was trying to find Chichi’s Magic, but she couldn't remember anything about it except that it was about a monkey and that the cover had a drawing of a monkey swinging through some trees on it.

For years, I always remembered to look for that book, and I even asked librarians if they knew of it. But when all I could them was that the book was about a monkey, the reply was always the same, “No, dear, I’m sorry. I don’t know of a book like that.” Long after my mother had given up, I kept searching, asking middle school and public librarians until, finally, I stopped asking. I really stopped looking too, but I never gave up on the idea of finding it.

Years and years later, we moved to Texas. I had graduated from high school when one day my cousin Jason asked me if I had ever read Chichi’s Magic.

“No,” I said, “I’ve never heard of it. What’s it about?”

“It’s a children’s book about a monkey (my ears perked up), but I think you’ll like it. It’s has all these mythical retellings; I’ll bring it by tomorrow.” True to his word, Jason brought the book by, but there was no monkey on the cover. Still, I read it; it was certainly a cute tale about overcoming obstacles. I had had it for only a couple days when mom asked me if I still asked people about the book with the monkey on the cover.

“No, I stopped asking about that years ago,” I told her, all the while that book Jason had loaned me was running through me head. Just for curiosity’s sake, I got up and walked into my room, rummaged around a bit for the book, and reappeared in front of her with it in my hands. I handed it to her and asked her to look at. She looked skeptical—there was no monkey on the cover, but when she opened it, the title popped off the page, and there, in a brightly colored illustration, was the monkey we’d all been looking for. She literally jumped out of her seat and screamed, “This is it! This is it!” After years of searching, my mom was reacquainted with Chichi, her childhood friend.

But this story doesn’t end here. Of course, the book was Jason’s, and Chichi had to be returned to him. By this time I was in college and after years of searching, I couldn’t let all of this go, so I began searching the internet for old and used bookstores. I found biblio.com, a site for used and rare books, and an antique bookseller in New Jersey had one copy listed under its stock. I called the store, and a charming old lady answered. With the patience of a saint, she listened as I told her about my decades long search.

“Yes, I still have it. In fact, I was doing inventory the other day and placed it on a back shelf.” She placed me on hold as she rummaged through her stock.

“Here it is. It’s in excellent condition, a first edition too. A library edition, I think.”

“A library edition?” I questioned her.

“Yes, it’s probably one of the first editions that the publishers issues to elementary schools.”

I liked the idea of finding an almost exact replica for my mom, but I needed to know one more thing.

“What’s on the cover?”

“It’s a picture of a monkey.” Without a second thought, I bought the book and had it shipped. I wanted it to arrive in time for Mother’s Day, but it was a few weeks late. It didn’t matter. I just left the gift at the house along with a note explaining that this was her belated Mother’s Day gift and went to school. Hours later, I got this call; it was my mom. She was crying so much that all I could understand was, “I got the book.”

Later, I sent a "thank you" to the bookseller for helping me in my search. Her reply was simple, “I’m glad that I could help make that dream come true.”