Chung Lee Loves Lobsters

Ted McGee is an associate professor of English at St. Jerome’s
College, University of Waterloo.

Chung Lee Loves Lobsters is something of a mystery, as two lads,
5-year-old Bizzer and 10-year-old Wally, decide first to trail old Mr.
Lee to his home, later to spy on him as he settles himself on a
Charlottetown beach for his picnic supper. For 35 years, Chung Lee
cooked at a seafood restaurant. Now, once a month, on the very day his
old-age pension cheque arrives, he returns to Budobber’s to buy a
live, healthy, female lobster. Watching the old man take his lobster,
uncooked, from a cooler and release it into the sea, the boys learn in a
new, surprising way how Chung Lee loves lobsters.

MacDonald’s story—combining as it does the old man and the young
boys; the images of people nourished by the sea and the sea replenished
by people; the sense of human mortality with the affirmation of faith in
an ongoing life both for the ancestors of lobsters and for those of
humans—is powerful and heartening. Nor is the story the least bit
heavy-handed, for it relies strongly on dialogue, which keeps the
boys’ perceptions of things front and centre.

Wales’s watercolors add charm, richness of detail, and humor. Though
the soft focus and colors romanticize the scene, it remains unmistakably
Charlottetown.

In this picture book, both author and artist get almost everything just
right.