"The Boy from Clearwater" Lesson

When Tsai finally returns to life as a student, he is asked to participate in a book club where student's share about books they are interested in reading. This comes back to haunt him later, as Taiwan falls under the leadership of the Republic of China, and civilians are arrested en masse for suspicion of "illegal" assembly. When Tsai is swept up in these arrests, he is sentenced to ten years of hard labor on the prison island "Green Island." 

The Boy from Clearwater's second book is a masterpiece of recovery and renewal. Upon his release from "Green Island," Tsai struggles to adapt to a new world, feeling that he is ten years behind all of his peers. He reunites with his childhood love, has a chance to start (and fail) at several business adventures. Tsai's recovery and growth matches pace with the country of Taiwan, which has a chance to define itself after decades of Japanese and Mainland Chinese leadership. 

I learned so much from this book, and knew that I had to share it with students. I chose sections of the book that dealt with Tsai's childhood, knowing that students would connect with the sweet story of him searching for sugarcane with his friends as a kindergartner. I also chose the parallel story of him and his friends eating sugarcane while hiding from an air raid, believing this would get the students interested in the wartime story and activate what they have learned about WWII in the past. 

In order to encourage students to connect with the text, I altered the strategy of "Word-Phrase-Sentence" and had students identify a word, an image, and a sentence or "big idea" that they believe were represented by the excerpts from the story.