Blue Willow By Doris Gates

What Blue Willow By Doris Gates Actually Is

Blue Willow is a novel. It was written by Doris Gates and published in 1940. It won a Newbery Honor that same year. The story follows Bing, a young Chinese-American boy growing up in rural California during the 1920s and 30s. He works on his family's farm, navigates prejudice from the white community around them, and deals with his own family tensions, including his mother's dissatisfaction with their life and his father's steady, quiet perseverance. The title comes from the blue willow pattern on a plate Bing's mother buys from a secondhand store — it represents the kind of beauty she feels is just out of reach for someone like her. I've used this book in middle school classrooms for years now. It works well with 6th through 8th grade readers. The vocabulary is accessible. The emotional core — a child wanting to belong somewhere — is universal. But there are some things you need to be aware of before you assign it. The book deals with racial discrimination directly. Chinese immigrants in 1920s California face real hostility. There are scenes where Bing is taunted, where his family is treated as less than. Some parents and administrators have objected to this book over the years. If you're planning to use it in a school setting, know that beforehand. Prepare for questions. The material is age-appropriate but it is not gentle.

The other thing teachers miss is that this book works best when paired with discussion about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its aftermath. Students often come in knowing nothing about the historical context. Without that framing, they read it as a period piece about mean people being mean. With the history, it becomes something sharper and more useful. I usually spend one class period going over the exclusion laws and the broader context of Chinese immigration to the American West. It takes about 45 minutes. Students who have that background engage with the book differently — they notice the structural racism Bing faces rather than reading it as individual cruelty.

How to Obtain the Book

Blue Willow is in the public domain in many contexts but the situation is a bit muddled because it was published in 1940 and copyright was renewed. Here is what I can tell you from experience: If you are a teacher looking to order multiple copies, Schools In minnesota and similar educational distributors sometimes carry it. I have also had luck ordering through Follett School Solutions for classroom sets. Pricing varies but you can usually get a hardcover classroom edition for under $12 per copy when ordering in bulk. The prose is straightforward. Gates does not ornamentalize anything. That is both the book's strength and its weakness. Some modern readers find it plain, even dry. I would argue that plainness is the point. Bing's world is not a fairy tale. His mother wants pretty things she cannot afford. His father keeps working. The narrative voice mirrors that restraint.

There is one passage that I always have students annotate — it is when Bing's mother looks at the blue willow plate and says something along the lines of wanting the beauty she sees in store windows. That single moment carries the entire economic and emotional weight of the novel. Students who catch it early tend to have a much richer reading experience. I usually ask them to highlight every time a character expresses a desire for something they cannot have. By the end of the book, the pattern is clear and it hits harder. A counterintuitive thing about this book: it reads easier for students who are not familiar with Chinese-American history than for those who are deeply familiar with it. Students who know the full scope of anti-Chinese violence in American history sometimes find the book's depiction incomplete or too mild. They want more. That is a legitimate reaction. When that happens, I pair it with excerpts from actual historical accounts or autobiographies from the same period. It gives them the fuller picture the novel sketches around.

Common Problems When Assigning This Book

The biggest issue I run into is students skipping the middle sections. The farm work descriptions — the planting, the harvesting, the daily routine — tend to lose people. These sections are necessary for understanding why Bing's family struggles financially and why the mother's restlessness makes sense. If students drop off in the middle, they misread the mother as simply ungrateful rather than trapped. I have found that asking students to keep a simple two-column journal — one side for what is happening on the farm, one side for what is happening in the mother's head — keeps them engaged through those sections. It takes about ten minutes of setup and then they are self-monitoring the whole time. Another issue: some students project modern assumptions onto the father. They see him as passive or weak because he does not fight back publicly against the discrimination. But the book carefully shows that his quiet endurance is its own form of strength and its own form of protest. I usually do a short role-play exercise where students write what the father might say versus what he actually does, and the gap between the two reveals a lot about the historical reality of immigrant men in that era who had very little legal recourse. The book is short — around 180 to 200 pages depending on the edition. A careful class reading with discussion takes about three to four weeks at a normal pace. If you are reading it solo, plan on two or three evenings. It is not a book you race through. The power is in the accumulation of small moments.

Blue Willow By Doris Gates and Its Place in YA Curricula

This book sits in an awkward space for curriculum planners. It is too literary for elementary school but too simple-looking for high school AP classes. It fits best in the 6th to 8th grade bracket where students are developing their ability to handle historical fiction that deals with real injustice without being overwhelmed by graphic content. It is a bridge text. That is why it persists in classrooms despite being almost ninety years old. If you are looking for companion readings, I recommend pairing it with something by Hisaye Yamamoto or Maxine Hong Kingston for the Chinese-American perspective, and perhaps an excerpt from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath for the agricultural labor context. The Steinbeck pairing specifically helps students understand that Bing's family is not an isolated case — they are part of a much larger migration and labor story. I do not have a shortcut for making this book work. It works when you treat it seriously and give students the context they need. It falls flat when you hand it out and say read chapter one by Friday. That is true for most books from this era but it is especially true here because the historical distance is real and it is easy to gloss over.