Ping: The Story of a Desperate Duck

A fun little essay that I wrote for a lit class.

In our modern day of MTV, sex-saturated advertising, and profanity-laden sitcoms, most parents expect to monitor their child’s television watching. What they do not expect, however, is to monitor their preschooler’s bedtime stories. After all, books—especially children’s books—are more or less safe, right? Not so fast. Just because of their respected “literary” medium, parents must not neglect to examine themessage of their child’s “harmless” storybooks.

Let us examine Marjorie Flack’s classic children’s tale The Story About Ping. Written in 1933, this classic story has been read to generations. The message? Less than stellar.

This excruciating tale of corporal punishment and injustice opens on a cozy, “wise-eyed” boat floating placidly on the calm Yangtze River. On this boat lives Ping, along with his mother and father and two sisters and three brothers and eleven aunts and seven uncles and forty-two cousins. Every morning the ducks disembark from the wise-eyed boat to forage for food, and every evening the Master of the boat calls them back. However, every evening the Master indiscriminately whacks the last duck to board the wise-eyed boat. Is that justice? What are our children implicitly learning—to avoid being late?

One evening, through no fault of his own, Ping arrives late. Deciding to forgo the unfair punishment, he chooses rather to spend the night in a cozy bed of reeds. So far, so good. As the following day dawns, Ping yawns, stretches, and looks about for the wise-eyed boat—she’s nowhere in sight! Undeterred, our intrepid hero sets out in search of his family. A rather unpleasant day follows. Ping is—in agonizingly vivid language—captured and almost eaten. He sits miserably in an overturned basket, gazing through the bars (bars which, I may dare to add, unmistakably hint at a prison cell—coincidence? I think not!) contemplating his fate. As the last, dying rays of the setting sun sink into the Yangtze, signaling Ping’s own imminent death (and for those who don’t believe that ducks can wax eloquent, skim Ping’s pathetically helpless monologue on pages 24 and 25), one of his captors has a change of heart, and tosses our hero back into the welcoming Yangtze.

“Finally!” the reader cheers, “This morbid book is almost finished! Everything will turn out alright in the end after all.”

But not so—no! Ms. Flack agonizingly tortures her unsuspecting readers, having Ping race desperately towards the wise-eyed boat….only to receive a whack square on his helpless duck rump. An entire day of dodging danger, only to be welcomed home with a solid wallop! But Ping is back at home with his mother and father and two sisters and three brothers and eleven aunts and seven uncles and forty-two cousins, so all’s well that ends well—right? Hardly.

What sort of twisted moral is Ms. Flack providing to her young readers? That one must blend into the crowd, become inconspicuous to escape unjust punishment? Or merely that the world, as a whole, is unjust, and living a profoundly painful experience. That—as Westley says in William Goldman’s masterpiece, The Princess Bride—“Life is Pain, Highness. Anyone saying differently is trying to sell something.” Must she so strenuously pound this fact into her innocent readers’ heads? Or is her point merely that, since life is nasty, brutish and short anyhow, seek what comfort you can amidst your cozy family circle?

To be sure, Ms. Flack’s worldview is just as disturbing and unbalanced as Disney’s sugar-coated motto, “Be whatever you want to be—just follow your heart.” And, in all justice, as part of the greater social context, Ms. Flack’s message becomes still more excusable; after all, 1933—the year of its publishing—was one of the worst years of the Great Depression. Life at that time certainly did seem unjust, and if you wanted to survive you had to rely on your close-knit community. However, though Ms. Flack’s worldview is understandable—even excusable—there is no need for another generation of innocent children to be influenced by her message. There is no need for another generation to be exposed to this excruciating “classic”, filled with agonizingly near-death experiences and haphazard, arbitrary punishment. Spare yourself the pain. Spare your children the scarring. Please…just say no.