Tibet: Through the Red Box
June 27th, 2004by Peter Sís
ISBN: 0374375526
Caldecott-honored Sís tells a fantastic yet true story in this book. When Sís was a small child, his father, a documentary filmmaker, was sent away to film a highway project in remote China. What was supposed to be a two-month absence stretched out to two missed Christmases. When Sís is injured, his father finally returns, and tells him the stories of his journey as he lies in bed, recovering.
It turns out that the highway project the elder Sís was sent to film was the Chinese forcing their way into Tibet. An accident separates Sís the father from the rest of crew, and he is left to find his way in a strange land, not knowing the language or even where he is. During his ordeal, he keeps a diary.
Sís, author-illustrator, uses his father’s diary (kept in his study, in a red box) and his memory of his father’s stories about Tibet, to create a visually and emotionally rich book. Sís manages to present the story from three points of view: his father’s from the diary, his own as a child, and his now as a grown-up.
He uses his father’s study, full of wonderful objects, to ground the story. Sís knows how to use color — red, green, blue, and the black of night are all important. He adds so many small touches with his side-notes and secondary sketches that even the more text-heavy pages include absorbing images. There are mandalas, recreations of family snapshots with the father figure a missing-yet-glowing white, and detailed two-page landscapes.
The stories cover how his father was sent out on his journey, his unlikely interaction with a postal boy, stories about yetis, monks, human-headed fish, and the Dalai Lama. The horror brought to the story is by the reader, because we know the consequences of China coming to Tibet. There is also the near-horror of Sís not realizing how important the Tibet stories and his father’s sharing of them really were.
This book tells the kind of tales that are too extraordinary to be true, yet they feel so right the way they are told they couldn’t be anything but. Highly recommended.
