Ping earns money shining shoes and helps his mother in the Hong Kong marketplace. More than anything he wants to go to school. But his wish must wait for fulfillment, for Ping's city is filled with countless others like himself—refugees from homes far away, all waiting, all hoping to replace the things they left behind and must now receive from kind strangers.
In five stories of children in five different lands, Elizabeth Coatsworth communicates the plight of the homeless: Pierre, whose father, a Watusi herdsman, yearns for his lost cattle; Jolanda, whose family must choose between returning to Hungary and finding freedom in a new country; Leila, in exile from fighting in Algeria; the four little Tibetan boys whose months-long trek across the plains of India unites them at last with their beloved Dalai Lama.
Many of Elizabeth Coatsworth's best-loved books—Ronnie and the Chief's Son, The Boy with the Parrot—have been about children in other lands. Her superb characterizations here again transcend place and circumstance to speak to all children, everywhere.
—from the dust jacket
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