The Red Corduroy Shirt

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

A red corduroy shirt becomes an introduction and a bond between two
immigrant boys, one from Hungary and the other from China. Jerry and
Jake are perhaps ten or eleven years old. When Jerry gives Jake the
shirt that Jake has greatly admired—a shirt now laundered and packaged
like the precious gift it is—complications arise. Jake’s mother’s
angrily responds, “We do not accept clothes from people”; the gift
must be returned. A resolution of sorts is effected through art and the
power of friendship. The story evokes two immigrant households, with
their different cultures and different ways of living and thinking, and
chronicles the boys’ efforts to bridge the chasm.

Joseph Kertes’s text is short but effective, with small touches that
shed light on the minds and backgrounds of the two boys. Peter Perko’s
realistic full-page drawings succeed in capturing the essence of the two
households; although excellent in content, their artistic quality is
unexceptional. Recommended.