What could be more fun for Chinese New Year next week than a story about a girl who rescues the last dragon in China? Two years ago Dragonkeeper was published to international acclaim. Touching, wise, fresh, funny and gripping, it’s exactly what Hollywood should snap up before the Beijing Olympics, and in the wake of Harry Potter.
“I’ve had lots of letters from Asian girls saying how much Ping means to them, and how nice it is to reconnect with their heritage through a Chinese heroine,” the author, Carole Wilkinson, says. “Though she also strikes a chord with older readers, particularly women, who relate to Ping’s feeling that she isn’t good at anything.”
Ping, who begins as an illiterate slave, possesses no exceptional abilities other than persistence, courage and love. It is these that make her the last, and greatest, Dragonkeeper in China. She frees Long Danzi from his dungeon, where his mate has died, simply because she loves animals and learns to her horror that the Emperor is about to sell him to a dragon hunter for body parts. As they flee together, Ping learns that he can speak, read and perform magic.
It is the start of an epic journey across China, to Ocean - and beyond, because, while Danzi leaves her for the Isle of the Blest, she is left in charge of a special stone. It is an egg, which hatches into a difficult baby dragon, Kai. How Ping manages to keep them both alive in the teeth of necromancers, selfish emperors, war and want is the stuff of a childhood classic, beautifully written in clear, dramatic prose.
Their adventures, first in Garden of the Purple Dragon and now in Dragon Moon, are as much about Ping’s rites of passage as about electrifying battles between good and evil, culminating in a rip-roaring fight between Kai and an embittered black dragon who hates human beings.
Advertisement
Even considering the dragons of Dick King-Smith, Cressida Cowell and Ursula Le Guin, these are a blast. “There was no contest!” the author says, laughing. “Chinese dragons are the only ones that are friendly to humans. Despite a modern trend to more sociable dragons, in mythology all the other dragons of the world are deadly. They would prefer a human barbecued for breakfast rather than as a travelling companion.”
Wilkinson’s first book was inspired by a story she came across when reading about dragon mythology in China. “There was a reference to a 2,000-year-old Chinese history book, and I found a translation at a library. In it was a very short story about an emperor who had two pairs of dragons. Their keeper didn’t know how to care for dragons, and one died. To get rid of the evidence he chopped up the body and made pickle out of it. I thought that was the most amazing little story I’d ever heard.”
Surprisingly, given the authentic flavour of the stories, Wilkinson is not Chinese but Australian - as is Lian Hearn, who also looked for inspiration in the Far East when she immersed herself in medieval Japanese culture to write Tales of the Otori.
“I did do Chinese language and creative writing majors at university, but the books evolved without any plans,” she says.
Wilkinson has had a long apprenticeship. She was born in 1950 in England and wrote 25 educational books before being invited to write fiction in 2000. These were Ancient Egyptian thrillers and other historical novels followed. But the Dragonkeeper trilogy is in another league. Ping’s humility is deeply touching, as are her relationships with humans and dragons. Again and again, she is told she is no good at anything. Only Long Danzi believes in her, and helps her to find the inner strength to defeat enchanters and bring Kai up in a safe place.
Advertisement
One of the most famous children’s writers, P.L.Travers, of Mary Poppins fame, set the bar pretty high for Australian children’s authors, but Wilkinson is part of a new generation of gifted, bestselling fantasy writers, who include - as well as Lian Hearn - Garth Nix, Robert Ingpen, Tim Winton and Sophie Masson. It was seeing how Asian girls at her daughter’s school “just try that much harder” that helped to develop Ping into a heroine that boys as well as girls of 9+ find inspirational.
“I didn’t base her on a particular Chinese girl. Actually, there’s a lot of me in Ping. When I was at school, I was a very average kid. I didn’t excel at anything. There were big classes in my day and I never thought that any teachers remembered my name. I had no confidence in myself. It never occurred to me that I could do anything interesting. That’s why I didn’t start writing until I was 40. I wanted Ping to inspire young people who are like me, who aren’t the kids at the top of the class or terrific at sports or gifted musicians. They may not believe they have any skills that are out of the ordinary, but I hope they will be encouraged to search inside themselves, find their talents and work hard to refine them.”
Dragon Moon by Carole Wilkinson
Macmillan, £8.99; 336pp