My childhood Communist indoctrination When I was …
admin December 12th, 2006
My childhood Communist indoctrination
When I was a wee ‘un, I had this book my mommy gave me. It’s called Fanshen the Magic Bear, by Becky Sarah, illustrated by Dana Smith. I liked this book as a munchkin. It had pretty illustrations (really very well done), and it was a fanciful story about a girl named Laura who has an encounter with a talking bear. It was also ragingly socialist, but we’ll get to that. I don’t know how the book survived all of my book purges over the years, apart from the fact that it’s very small and I probably didn’t know I still had it, but I ran across it when I was moving a few years ago and The Big Seester and I had some good laughs. Now I keep it as (a) a reminder to myself of how I was indoctrinated, and (b) in case I ever need to give evidence, either against my mother or in defense of myself. :-p
Regrettably, I cannot post this book in its entirety. It’s pretty short, but it is copyrighted (oh, the irony), and I don’t know what the bounds of the law are. Since the material is copyrighted “only to prevent its being misused; feminist, left, and movement groups, and people working with children, will be given permission to reprint,” I have to acknowledge that the holders of the copyright would probably consider my distaste for its precepts to be prima facie evidence that my reprinting it entails misuse. So to be cautious, I’ll simply offer a précis of the story, and perhaps some choice quotes.
Laura is a tax collector in a small kingdom. She and her pony Marigold don’t like their job, because they don’t like taking people’s things, but she is forced to by the king. (”…the king made her do it. He wouldn’t even let her quit her job, adn she was afraid of him.”) As one might expect, the king is indolent and oppressive, taking more than the people can afford to give while he’s rolling in the loot. After collecting ‘rent’ from people who can’t afford it, and hating her job, Laura meets a bear, who turns out to be a magic talking bear that Laura heard stories about from her grandfather when she was small. Fanshen and Laura talk about her job, and Fanshen suggests that Laura stop collecting the taxes. Laura is shocked, but decides she likes the idea, and promptly goes to give everything back to everyone. They are all, like her, shocked at the idea, but all agree. They go to confront the king, who has a temper tantrum. Everyone agrees on an equal division of the land (they give a piece to the king too), and he eventually gets on board with the agenda. They also make a park, and Laura’s job is to care for the park. A year later (at which point everyone is happy and everything is copesthetic copacetic (thank you, Bill!)), Laura tells everyone about Fanshen’s part in it.
Something I did not know before today: “fanshen” is actually Chinese. William Hinton, who apparently wrote a book about the Chinese Communist revolution. He defined “fanshen” thus:
Mind you, this book was published in 1973. There’s a lot more subtext than I’m describing here – after all, on the back of the book the publisher, New Seed Press, describes their publications as “…children’s books free from racial, class, or sex-role stereotyping.” There’s Molly the ferrywoman, Marigold is male, the illustrations carefully make some of the people black, Laura herself looks vaguely Native American or Asian…yadda yadda.
I’ll tell you, it is only by the grace of God that my out-and-out Marxist phase was as short as it was. I also had a comic book about the injustices of sharecropping…
Ah, my mother. Love her to bits, mind you, but she’s nuts.
