A fictional narrator recounts real-life scientist Pu Zhelong’s pest-control efforts with Chinese farmers in the province of Guangdong. Known in the 1960s and 1970s for their lychees and rice, village farmers struggled to eradicate the stinkbugs and leafroller moths that wreaked havoc on their crops. When they began using chemical pesticides, the problem seemed to be solved—until the pests returned even stronger the next year, forcing the farmers to up their pesticide use in what quickly became an increasingly poisonous and futile cycle. Pu Zhelong, who lived in the city of Guangzhou and had studied in the United States, traveled to the village to help the farmers implement a natural form of pest control: wasps that lay their eggs inside moth eggs, destroying the moth larvae before they have a chance to hatch. Cooperation between the initially reluctant village farmers and Pu Zhelong represents the merging of the concepts of soil (“local, rural, humble, and Chinese”) and ocean (“foreign, modern, elite, and Western”), with the goal of achieving environmentally sustainable—and effective—pest control. (Ages 6–10)

Winner of The Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award

Selected for the CCBC Choices 2019 list

Children's Literature Freeman Award 2018

A Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People 2019

Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean tells its story through the memories of a farm boy who, inspired by Pu Zhelong, became a scientist himself.

The narrator is a composite of people Pu Zhelong influenced in his work. With further context from Melanie Chan’s historically precise watercolors, this story will immerse young readers in Chinese culture, the natural history of insects, and the use of biological controls in farming. Backmatter provides context and background for this lovely, sophisticated picture book about nature, science, and Communist China.

“The first time I saw a scientist in my village was also the first time I saw a wasp hatch out of a moth’s egg,” writes the narrator of this picture book about Chinese scientist Pu Zhelong. “In that moment I could not have said which was the more unexpected—or the more miraculous.”

In the early 1960s, while Rachel Carson was writing and defending Silent Spring in the U.S., Pu Zhelong was teaching peasants in Mao Zedong’s Communist China how to forgo pesticides and instead use parasitic wasps to control the moths that were decimating crops and contributing to China’s widespread famine.

This story told through the memories of a farm boy (a composite of people inspired by Pu Zhelong) will immerse young readers in Chinese culture, the natural history of insects, and sustainable agriculture. Backmatter provides historical context for this lovely, sophisticated picture book.

The author, Sigrid Schmalzer, won the Joseph Levenson Post-1900 Book Prize for 2018 for her book Red Revolution, Green Revolution. This is the most prestigious prize for a book about Chinese history, and the book upon which Moth and Wasp, Soil and Ocean is based.

Fountas & Pinnell Level U