Meet Guest Blogger Caroline Zhang and Her Parakeets Budgie and Puff

Author Caroline Zhang at home in Palo Alto. 

Caroline Zhang is in the process of writing a novel about her two pet parakeets Budgie and Puff. Her working title is: Adventures of Budgie and Puff.

I met nine-year-old Caroline, who attends Palo Verde Elementary School in Palo Alto, when I became her English tutor last fall.  At some point she will start her own blog with some help and supervision from her Mom.  But for now, I offered her a guest spot on my own blog. Here Caroline writes about the inspiration behind her upcoming book.  She wrote and organized this essay on her own. I checked the spelling and grammar and took the author photo on my i-phone. Caroline's Mom photographed the parakeets.
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Ever since I got my parakeets, everything is brighter.  My parakeets are named Budgie and Puff.  The two birds are great friends to me and to each other.  They are fun to be with and very unique.  I have also observed them and I found some cool features that make up their personalities.

Budgie, a blue and white bird, is very adventurous and daring.  When I first got Budgie, I would use millet to lure Budgie to eat from my hand.  Budgie would cautiously step forward  and peck at the millet, even though she was still scared of me.  Budgie loves millet and loves to eat. You can lure Budgie with food all the time!  Surprisingly, Budgie is not fat at all.  I think that's because the millet is healthy and not a junk food.  Sometimes, while Budgie eats, she allows me to pet her.  

Puff, instead, eyed me as if I were a cat, ready to pounce on her.  Even now, Puff never lets me pet her, and she is sometimes even shy to come eat from my hand.  I think Puff really thinks things through, instead of charging at things blindly the way Budgie does.  Puff is also very acrobatic, she can climb the bars of the cage to get anywhere. On the other hand, Budgie is rather clumsy.  She often falls and lands awkwardly and she never climbs the cage bars, unless to get millet.

Budgie and Puff happily eating birdseed.

Budgie is also very determined.  Once I left a sprig of millet on the top of the cage, and Budgie climbed upside down to reach the millet and eat it.          

When I play the piano, Budgie and Puff will chirp along.  Budgie will chirp loudly and clearly, while Puff will chirp quietly, in an accompaniment to Budgie's singing.

One day, I realized that Budgie and Puff could be the perfect characters in an adventure story, because Budgie and Puff  show teamwork, which can be the key thing this adventure!  Overall, they do seem to help each other, bringing over some millet. Sometimes it looks like they are giving each other advice.  With the teamwork and different personalities, they make a great pair!



I noticed that Budgie could be the "brawn" and Puff could be the brain in a crazy adventure. That's how my novel, Adventures of Budgie and Puff came to be.  

If you are interested in Budgie and Puff, the book will come out in 2016! 
Enjoy!

Still eating...

About the Author

Caroline Zhang was born in California and she is now nine

years old. Caroline enjoys writing and she has a love for nature.

Caroline believes that nature is very important and that it should stay the way it is. We need to protect nature and animals. Speaking of animals, Caroline currently lives with her beloved parakeets, Budgie and Puff.

Death by Pastrami-- In Seventeen Short Bites

In 1955, an English major just out of the University of Michigan was forced to go into the family business, making pajamas in New York City's garment center.

Leonard S. Bernstein wanted to be a writer. But his Dad was ill and Leonard was asked to step in and save Candlestick Pajamas. Sixty years later, the Brooklyn-born Bernstein is back to his first professional passion-- writing short stories from his home in Westbury, Long Island. Now his kids are running the company--with a few new personnel policies.  One is that the sewing machine operators no longer take the subway to work from lower Manhattan, Spanish Harlem and Brooklyn. Now, the Bernstein kids visit them three times a year--in China.

Death by Pastrami is fiction--I guess you could call it historical fiction. Here are seventeen short stories--most based in the Garment Center of yore. Bernstein tells a Fordham University college radio interviewer on WFUV that any of the things that he writes about could have really happened back in Garment's Glory Days----the 1950s through the 1990s.
(You can hear the interview here) 

But there is a lot of magical realism and fantasy in the vein of Isaac Bashevis Singer--as in the title story, where a funeral salesman named Fleishman haunts Jewish delis, seeking future customers who will die of heart attacks.

Here's the hook: 
"Anyone eating a pastrami sandwich in a New York delicatessen is taking his life in his own hands. The smoked pastrami, piled six inches high, defies any digestive system short of a Bengal tiger. The fat content is enough to shut off the arterial system for a month. Blood has as much chance of reaching the heart as a car has of getting through the Lincoln Tunnel on Thanksgiving Day...So instead of camping out at the Blue Horizons Senior Citizen's Home, Fleishman headed for the Criterion Deli, figuring that if people are not dying on the spot they can't have long to go."

There is a story about a beautiful and elegant young Puerto Rican lace stitcher, Elena, a catalyst for both lust and respect in a factory foreman. The story, fittingly is called, "At Home I Would Have Been A Princess."

And there are tales of partnerships gone sour, bar room wagers, and a ragman who steals underwear.

And what of the rags themselves?  The leftover scraps on the garment cutting room floor?
Says Bernstein:
The rags would be sold for paper pulp, eventually recycling themselves on to the front pages of the New York Times. I always had the notion that the very rags that were lying carelessly in the cartons would soon appear before my eyes as a James Reston column.

I am going to buy ten copies of this book to give to friends who remember the time and place that Bernstein writes about.  My uncles "worked garment". Uncle Hy sold beads, Uncle Dave was a presser. Grandpa Willie supervised police and military uniforms.  George's Mom was an office manager at Smith Monograms.

People who remember when the apparel industry was known as the Garment Center--and Seventh Avenue was, well, Seventh Avenue, not Fashion Avenue--will enjoy the collection for the nostalgic value.
People who walk through the area on their way to and from Penn Station might want it for reading during the commute.
Those who love Jewish American fiction will enjoy it too.

Not sure who else this will especially appeal to, but I first learned about the collection from a report by Maureen Corrigan, the book reviewer for National Public Radio.
You can read/hear it here

Heard any great proverbs lately?

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones at hand do more toward a happy life than whole volumes that we know not where to find--Seneca

If you want to learn fast about a culture--or a family--pay close attention to the proverbs handed down from generation to generation. If you are a middle school or high school student, pay very close attention to the proverbs you hear from your elders. You can learn a whole lot about a culture by the proverbs that it shares with kids.

Proverbs are words to live by, inspirational sentences, or taglines of well known legends or fables. They often indicate collective wisdom rather than individual experience. Seneca aside, we generally don't know who authored our proverbs.

Here are some beloved proverbs from my own childhood:

THE EARLY BIRD CATCHES THE WORM

NEVER DO HALF A FAVOR

YOU CAN"T DANCE AT TWO PARTIES  (meaning you can't be in two places at one time--even if you want to be)

I am rediscovering the conversational and literary value of proverbs as I teach English as a second language to middle school kids.  Overall, young adult literature is teeming with proverbs. And proverbs, as you can already see from my own examples, are great conversational ice-breakers.

Which brings us to the  dead chicken that scared the monkey.
And a Mexican proverb
Because it all started last semester when my Reading Club for middle school kids who speak Mandarin as a first language began reading the novel Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan.

Click here for the Scholastic Readers Guide

If you are keeping up with our reading, you are already familiar with this riches to rags story about the adventures and misadventures of Esperanza-- the thirteen year old daughter of a wealthy Mexican landowner. When her Dad is killed by bandits and a mysterious fire destroys her ranch, she flees Mexico to become a fruit picker in California. But her timing couldn't be worse. She arrives just after the Dustbowl of the 1930s.

The book is filled with proverbs like: HE WHO FAILS TODAY MAY RISE TOMORROW.
Which we will discuss at length in class next week.
Even the name Esperanza is symbolic. It is the Spanish word for HOPE!

Last semester I told my student readers:
"None of us are really sure how proverbs--well known wise sayings--began. But every country and every culture seems to have them. Some may be serious and some may be funny. Do you know any proverbs?"

And ALL OF THE STUDENTS--ALL OF THEM--recite in Mandarin

 杀鸡儆猴 (shā jī jǐng hóu)

which means:

KILL THE CHICKEN TO SCARE THE MONKEY!

Killing the chicken to scare the monkey-- a classic Chinese proverb

Are you familiar with this proverb, as well?

Of course, if you know the tale, then you already know that the Mandarin proverb is there to serve as a warning.

You make an example of the chicken to get the monkey to behave.

Why do you want the monkey to behave?

Well it ties to a folktale (chéngyǔ) in which a street entertainer has a performing monkey.

Here is the tale--from the Web site That's Mandarin: Learn English in China.

There once was a street entertainer who attracted large crowds with his dancing monkey. Whenever he played the drums, the monkey danced to the rhythm, helping his master earn lots of money. Yet the monkey soon grew tired of this work, and one day refused to dance for his master. In order to force his monkey into compliance, the master brought a live chicken to the monkey and killed it right before his eyes. The monkey got the message and resumed dancing, knowing that if he stopped, he would suffer the same fate.

You may already be familiar with this theme which is also expressed in popular young adult fiction like The Hunger Games and Divergent and even The Giver.

And perhaps we'll have more discussion about these books in another class. For now, we need to get back to California and Esperanza rising during the Great Depression.

Last semester, one thirteen year girl asked, "Why didn't the monkey just run away?"

Answered another twelve year old boy:

"That's what would happen with an American monkey!"

Do you have a favorite saying or proverb that your family has shared with you?
If so, please share it in a response to this blog.
Don't have a proverb in mind?
Check out some wise sayings from a collection called 365 Days of Wonder: Mr Browne's Book of Precepts by R.J. Palacio
Ms. Palacio is that author of the best selling young adult novel--Wonder.

And keep in mind that I use 365 Days of Wonder in my ESLwriting tutorials-the precepts/maxims serve as great essay prompts.