The Boy Who Swallowed Snakes

by Laurence Yep

A Newbery Honor author and a team of distinguished illustrators present a captivating tale about the triumph of honesty and resourcefulness over greed and evil, as a boy takes desperate measures to save himself and his neighbors from the malevolent magic of the dreaded ku snake. Full color.

Genres: Picture Books, Fiction

32 pages, Library Binding

First published February 1, 1994

About the author

Born June 14, 1948 in San Francisco, California, Yep was the son of Thomas Gim Yep and Franche Lee Yep. Franche Lee, her family's youngest child, was born in Ohio and raised in West Virginia where her family owned a Chinese laundry. Yep's father, Thomas, was born in China and came to America at the age of ten where he lived, not in Chinatown, but with an Irish friend in a white neighborhood. After troubling times during the Depression, he was able to open a grocery store in an African-American neighborhood. Growing up in San Francisco, Yep felt alienated. He was in his own words his neighborhood's "all-purpose Asian" and did not feel he had a culture of his own. Joanne Ryder, a children's book author, and Yep met and became friends during college while she was his editor. They later married and now live in San Francisco.

Although not living in Chinatown, Yep commuted to a parochial bilingual school there. Other students at the school, according to Yep, labeled him a "dumbbell Chinese" because he spoke only English. During high school he faced the white American culture for the first time. However, it was while attending high school that he started writing for a science fiction magazine, being paid one cent a word for his efforts. After two years at Marquette University, Yep transferred to the University of California at Santa Cruz where he graduated in 1970 with a B.A. He continued on to earn a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1975. Today as well as writing, he has taught writing and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara.

Reviews

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Boy Who Swallowed Snakes is a fable. Little Chou lives with his mother and they are poor. When he finds a basket of silver left by a rich man he takes it home. In the basket is a poisonous snake that the rich man wanted to get rid of. Little Chou, to get rid of the snake, eats it. The snake multiplies and becomes many snakes. The results of Little Chou's actions make his family famous. When the rich man hears about it, he wants the snake back. However, things don't go well for him. The moral is that a pure heart doesn't take harm from poison, while an evil heart does.

[Arminzerella · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is definitely a little otherworldly and weird - a boy finds some treasure guarded by a ku snake, which must be fed by greed. The owner is trying to pass the snake off to someone else, but the boy decides he's having none of that, and he swallows the snake, which then multiplies. The owner, seeing that no harm has come to the boy and that there's the possibility to increase his takings by doubling the number of snakes (safely), takes back his snake and comes to a Very Bad End.

I think I would have been fascinated by this tale as a child. Would like to find some other re-tellings and compare them.

[Heidi-Marie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok. That was disturbing. REALLY. And pointless, too. I couldn't understand what the myth thing was throughout the story. Wasn't sure how the rich man was or wasn't being punished--until he died. And every night the boy eating snakes which then would shoot lights out of his stomach which doubled the number of snakes that glowed in the dark...? Um, definitely not for story time. I never said that everything about China was great.