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    A Study Guide for Mitali Perkins's "Bamboo People"
    A Study Guide for Mitali Perkins's "Bamboo People"
    A Study Guide for Mitali Perkins's "Bamboo People"
    Ebook51 pages41 minutes

    A Study Guide for Mitali Perkins's "Bamboo People"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Mitali Perkins's "Bamboo People", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781410393654
    A Study Guide for Mitali Perkins's "Bamboo People"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Mitali Perkins's "Bamboo People" - Gale

      18

      Bamboo People

      Mitali Perkins

      2010

      Introduction

      Bamboo People is the story of two fifteen-year-old boys on either side of the civil war that has riven Burma for decades. Chiko lives in Yangon, a city in Burma, where his father is a doctor. The government has turned against educated people, and they have arrested Chiko's father. He and his mother have no money to live on and have sold most of their possessions for food. Chiko answers an ad for teaching positions and is taken into the army, where his only comfort is that his mother will now be receiving his small salary. Tu Reh, the other protagonist of this story, is a fifteen-year-old boy from the Karen tribe who is living with his family in a refugee camp after the Burmese army burned their house and fields. When Tu Reh finds Chiko gravely injured after a land mine explosion, he has a moral choice to make. Does he see the humanity in the injured boy before him and save him, or does he see only a hated soldier of the army that has done such damage to his people and kill him?

      Mitali Perkins was inspired to write this novel after spending three years in Thailand with her husband, who is a Presbyterian minister. They spent time in the refugee camps where the Karen people and members of other minority tribes of Burma have been forced to take refuge. She was impressed by the indomitable spirit of the Karenni, a spirit she saw mirrored in the bamboo plant upon which they relied for almost all their building and transportation needs. The ecologically efficient and endlessly flexible bamboo plant felt to her like an apt metaphor for the situation in which the Burmese people found themselves.

      Author Biography

      Perkins was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, on April 30, 1963, Her mother, Madhusree Bose, was a teacher, and her father, Sailendra Nath Bose, was a civil engineer and port director. She has two sisters, and as is the custom in Bengali families, their names rhyme: Sonali means gold, Rupali means silver, and Mitali means friendly. Their father's profession took them all over the world, and as a child Perkins lived in Ghana, Cameroon, London, New York, and Mexico. When she was in seventh grade, the family settled in California. She claims that all this moving around forced her to live up to her name and also taught her that stories can be a source of great solace. In a biographical note on her website, she notes that my biggest lifeline during those early years was story. She goes on, Books were my rock, my stability, my safe place as I navigated the border between California suburbia and the Bengali culture of my traditional home.

      Perkins eventually attended both Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied public policy, after which she taught at the middle-school, highschool, and university levels. Married to a Presbyterian minister, Perkins began writing stories for young readers. She has often found inspiration for her work in her own experience, as a child growing up between cultures. She told Lyn Miller-Lachmann of the Albany (NY) Times Union that she writes to champion marginalized voices. Bamboo People, published in 2012, grew out of her experiences during the three years she and her family spent in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where they worked with Burmese refugees, especially the Karenni people. In that

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