The Pink Pajamas
A Story About Love and Loss
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From Stonewall Award–winning illustrator Charlene Chua comes a tender, heartfelt story about love, loss, and the innumerable ways to carry someone in your heart, always, as a young girl honors her aunt’s memory by wearing the pink pajamas she sewed for her.
There are many ways of saying, “I love you.” For Ah Yi, it’s with her sewing machine, making extra soft, perfectly tailored pajamas for her niece. The little girl loves each pair, except the latest one which is pink, her least favorite color. She keeps a happy face on, but her aunt can always tell. She reassures the little girl there’s no need to worry—she’ll just make another pair.
But then Ah Yi gets too sick to use her sewing machine, so sick she has to go away to the hospital…and never comes home. Her niece doesn’t know what to make of the funeral customs until she finds her own special remembrance: wearing her pink pajamas, which were perfect all along.
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When a beloved aunt's illness stills the sewing machine she uses to make special gifts, a child realizes what she's lost in Chua's heart-tugging tale. Weekend dinners at Ye Ye and Po Po's house are a chance for the young narrator to see Ah Yi, who's always at her old sewing machine that goes "clack, clack, clack." Ah Yi communicates love by sewing—bags, curtains, toys, and the child's favorite, pajamas that are "soft. They are comfortable. And they are always just the right length." One week, Ah Yi gifts the narrator new pajamas in an unfavored pink; though Ah Yi says she'll sew another pair, the woman's hospitalization and subsequent death forestall the project. But as the family tidies Ah Yi's things, the pink pajamas reappear, along with a final gift. Chua's ink-drawn and digitally colored illustrations make the pink pajamas pop, while straightforward prose pierces in its simple yearning. Characters cue as Chinese. Ages 4–8.
