Comparing and Contrasting America's Cinderella to Asia's Cinderella

                                   America                                         Asia


Title:                        Cinderella                                         Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China.

Characters:              Cinderella, evil stepmother, evil twins,     Yeh-Shen, stepmother, a fish, prince.
                               father, fairy god mother, prince.

Setting:                    The Castle/forest                                  Pond, festival

Actions:                   Cinderella attends the ball being            Yeh-Shen befriends a fish whom her stepmother 
                               dressed by her fairy godmother whom    kills, she keep the bones which are magical and 
                               has a magic wand, Cinderella looses     uses them to prepare for the festival at which 
                               her slipper, the prince finds it and they   she looses her slipper, meets the king and 
                               fall in love.                                           falls in love.

Theme:                    A young woman falls in love with           A young woman falls in love with the king with the 
                               the prince with the help of magic.          help of magic.

By reading the chart above you are able to see that although the book is still the Cinderella we know, is a multicultural story. The book Cinderella has a universal theme of a young, poor girl who is treated poorly be her stepmother. The girl then comes in contact with magic, attends an event, meets a man of royalty and they fall in love after he has found her missing item. There are many versions of Cinderella which all represent cultural differences. For example; in the books that I compared you can see that instead of a fairy godmother, the young girl presents magic through the bones of a fish. Fish are thought of highly in Asia and therefore represent that through their story. As stated in  The Joy of Children's Literature  there is a need for more multicultural literature."Efforts have been made in recent years to increase the publication and recognition that multicultural children's literature deserves." Creating multicultural Cinderella stories is a great way to increase the population and awareness of multicultural literature.