Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths is a delightful story featuring the eponymous Danny, son of parents who run a Chinese takeaway, his friend Ravi, his doting granny (Nai Nai) and assorted oddball friends and neighbours. Danny loves drawing, hates maths, and is appalled when Nai Nai moves to Birmingham from China and he has to share his bedroom with her. He can't speak her dialect, she snores like a train, farts for England (or rather China) and worst of all, she turns up at his school to bring him Chinese lunch. Oh, and he has to look after her because his mum and dad are busy running their takeaway. When the local bowls club are less than welcoming, he leaves her at the bingo and goes off to play in the park. Then Danny discovers that Nai Nai, unlike her grandson, has maths skills in abundance. She not only becomes the local bingo champion, she takes her grandson in hand and helps him create a great school project based on Fibonacci fractals in Romanesco cauliflowers.
A novel about an immigrant family inevitably has a certain
amount of cultural information to impart. Dragons, in their Chinese version,
feature a lot. As Danny says, ‘I was
really pleased with my newest creation that I called a DRUCKON. It was a mutant
duck with a dragon’s head. It’s very Chinese, if you ask me. Dragons are the
most beloved and lucky creatures in Chinese mythology, and ducks are yummy and
succulent. The tricky part was the head. Chinese dragons don’t look like other
dragons and they have no wings. Ravi is basically an expert on all things medieval
and knights. He says that Chinese dragons are anomalies, which is a nice
way of saying they’re ‘weird’. And they don’t go around trying to eat
princesses or battle knights. I think that’s nice. A druckon is a Chinese
win-win.’
There is also an odious tiger mother, who drags her daughter Amelia to an unending series of after-school improving activities, as a result of which she is fluent in both Cantonese and Mandarin. And there is The Chinese Way – Danny’s dad drills its tenets into his son – hard work, respect for his elders, and of course the importance of maths, the bane of Danny’s life. We even learn a bit of the language, when Danny and Nai Nai exchange a few words in Chinese. However, Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths wears its culture lightly. The heart of the novel is the friendship and respect that grows between the boy and his granny, and the adventures they share.
Fifty
years separate the stories and that makes for interesting comparisons. Of
course, the novels are aimed at different readers: an adult readership and
pre-teen young readers. But there are similarities. Both families run
restaurants, both firmly believe in The Chinese Way, both have a newly-arrived
and eccentric grandparent. (Grandpa in Sour Sweet prefers to sleep under the counter instead
of the bedroom, and invites fellow-patients from the local clinic to tea, even
though they cannot understand each other.) Both families are the odd-ones-out
in their communities. Lily and Mui have no friends apart from their customers
and a benevolent widow, Mrs Law, and remain culturally and socially isolated in
their London suburb. They are further ‘othered’ in one rather odd way: Mo
chooses to have his characters speak a sort of Canto-English. ‘Bad talk!’ Lily
reprimands Chen. And ‘Husband, door is stuck!’ And she asks her son about his
aunt’s new baby, ‘Did you like baby, Son?’ to which Man-Kee replies, ‘Didn’t
like it.’ I do not think that this would be considered either acceptable or
necessary today, although at least when the family have something important to
say to each other, they revert to received English.
Multi-culturalism and racism are not explicitly addressed in either novel but, by way of a contrast to fifty years ago, Danny lives in a Britain that feels more accepting of its separate communities: his best friend is Ravi, an Indian boy, and we are given snapshots of Ravi’s family and his crowded home.
British appreciation of Chinese food has
improved over half a century too. In Sour Sweet, ‘The food they sold… bore no
resemblance at all to Chinese cuisine. Sweet and sour pork was their staple,
naturally: batter musket balls encasing a tiny core of meat, laced with a
scarlet sauce that had an interesting effect on the urine of the customer the
next day.’ In 2021, Danny soon finds that his bothersome Nai Nai is a wonderful
cook, ‘Nai Nai went into the kitchen to make
herself a pot of tea and came out ten minutes later with a plate full of
guotie, or, as some people call them, potstickers. I loved them, but Ba never
had time to make them for me any more. He was always too busy. I grabbed some
chopsticks and started munching them down after dipping them in soy sauce with
a bit of cut ginger in it. Nai Nai’s potstickers were SO good, just like Ba had
always said.’
Here’s a personal anecdote to illustrate the progress in British taste buds: in 1973, my parents celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I organized a dinner for them, with family, (white British, one and all) in a Chinese restaurant in Earls Court, possibly the first in London to serve Peking Duck. My parents (farmers in Wiltshire) arrived in some trepidation, probably worried that dinner would be musket balls and scarlet gloop and that they would lose face with their brothers and sisters. They left delighted and well-fed. I was eternally grateful to my landlady, who had introduced me to the restaurant. She was Dymia Hsiung, widow of playwright Hsiung Shih-I and a writer herself, as well as an enthusiastic mah-jong player and a fabulous cook. Now there’s a cultural connection to conjure with.
Danny Chung Does Not Do Maths, by Maisie Chan, delightfully illustrated by Anh Cao, age-graded 9-11 years, Piccadilly Press,10th June 2021.
Sour Sweet, by Timothy Mo, new edition, Paddleless Press, 1999.
