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Living History
(2003). As a small child in Park Ridge, Illinois, Clinton designed a
spaceship in the basement of her family’s house. Her two-year-old brother Hugh
came along with her on “space trips,” sometimes hearing bad news from his older
sister. Clinton explains, “To this day he says he was warped for life because one
time I threw him out of the space ship and left him floating in space, and told
him he couldn’t come up to lunch because he was lost somewhere around Mer-
cury” (“Idyllic” 164). With her mother, Clinton built a “fantasy world in a large
cardboard box” and made up stories for which her dolls became characters (
Living
History
10).
Clinton also spent many hours playing “chase and run,” a game in which
team members ran toward safe areas within a two- or three-block section of their
neighborhood. Summer pursuits included corner baseball, softball, and kickball,
with sewer lids as bases. Clinton enjoyed active sports, including backyard hockey
and neighborhood Olympics. She expresses sadness about twenty-first-century
American children having less unsupervised playtime and hopes that their time
for play and games will increase: “That would be one of the best gifts we could
give our children” (165).
Another contemporary memoir that eloquently describes the importance of
creative play is Jeannette Walls’s
Th
e Glass Castle
(2005). Walls’s brilliant, eccentric
father and free-spirited, artistic mother gave their children love and encourage-
ment but often let the children go hungry as the family moved from one place to
another. Money was scarce, and the children slept in cardboard boxes when they
were small; once they were old enough to go to school, Walls and her sisters and
brother foraged in garbage cans for leftover food from other children’s lunches.
One memorable Christmas, when her father could not afford to buy any pres-
ents, he gave each of his children a wonderful gift: the choice of a star in the
desert sky. With very few restrictions on playtime activities, the Walls children
looked for treasures at the town dump, played with matches, and mixed several
kinds of hazardous waste to create what they called “nuclear fuel” (61). They
also spent time playing Red Rover, Red Light Green Light, and other traditional
games with neighborhood kids. Stamina came from playing “nameless games
that involved running hard, keeping up with the pack, and not crying if you fell
down” (58).
At school, the Walls children endured other children’s taunts and assaults.
When the bully Ernie Goad told the Walls kids, “Y’all are a bunch of garbage,”
they retaliated by making a catapult with ropes, a mattress, and rocks. Hurling
“an arsenal of rocks” at Ernie and his gang, the Walls kids triumphantly drove
their tormenters away (165–67). Later, during sixth grade, Jeannette’s classmates
called her “spider legs, skeleton girl, pipe cleaner, two-by-four, bony butt, stick
Contexts 129
woman, bean pole, and giraffe”; they also told her she could keep dry during
a thunderstorm if she stood under a telephone wire (173). In spite of these in-
sults, she found her niche at school as a journalist and gained respect as a serious
writer.
Pascal Khoo Thwe, the author of
From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese
Odyssey
(2002), was born in Burma in 1967. A member of the Padaung people,
Thwe enjoyed a childhood influenced by folk beliefs and traditions. A few weeks
after his birth, his father rubbed a pulverized spider on his head to make him
smart and hardworking. His grandmother, who had traveled to England as a
member of Bertram Mills’s circus, spat on his head three times to save him from
evil spirits. As a young child, Thwe slept in a big bed with his parents and sib-
lings, surrounded by the comforting sounds and smells of his family group.
At the age of five, Thwe reluctantly left home to attend a government board-
ing school. His teacher, Mr. Joseph, bullied his pupils, and the children bullied
each other:
They carried catapults, flint pellets, knives and other ingeniously painful homemade
weapons. I was a new target, and it seemed impossible not to be part of the system of bul-
lying. Not only did they bully you, they also forced you to join them in bullying others,
to cheat in exams and even to ambush unsuspecting teachers on their way home. To hurt
me they would call me by my father’s name, because for some reason we Padaung found
it insulting when someone uttered the names of our parents. (45– 46)
Thwe’s helplessness as a victim of bullying mirrors many other children’s feelings
in similar situations. Fortunately, after Thwe told his Uncle Yew about the prob-
lem, Uncle Yew started spending time at the government school, taking the chil-
dren on hunting expeditions, and showing them how to practice better behavior.
Thwe’s autobiography also includes other kinds of childhood folklore. He and
his friends chased each other, “jumping from branch to branch like monkeys”
(74). Spending nights in his own tree house, he watched the stars until he fell
asleep; some of his dreams became predictions of future events that his family
took very seriously. Eventually, he became the “unofficial family oracle” (53).
Belief in ghosts enlivened his childhood years. As a small boy, he worried about
going outside to the bathroom near the parish priest’s house, which had a reputa-
tion for being haunted. If the priest found excrement near his house, he made
children walk around it until one of the children admitted who had defecated on
the ground (27). Besides worrying about the haunted area near the priest’s house,
Thwe and his friends feared “green ghosts,” the vengeful spirits of people who
had died because of accident or murder (85). Ghosts continued to be important
presences throughout his college years, when he shared a dwelling with other
students and became a guerrilla fighter against the government’s forces.
130 Children’s
Folklore
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