I Am the Cheese he was confused and depressed, convinced that he was alienating his new young adult audience because of the complex and ambiguous story. However, "I Am the Cheese" proved to be a success. "I Am the Cheese" was named to five annual book lists according to the publisher description of the 20th anniversary edition. It won the 1997 Phoenix Award from the Children's Literature Association as the best English-language children's book that did not win a major award when it was originally published twenty years earlier. It is named for the mythical bird phoenix, which is reborn from its ashes, to
Birds in Chinese mythology and actually real exotic birds is sometimes blurred. Sometimes, the student of the real versus the unreal becomes challenged. Various sources for information on Chinese legends and mythology about bird. This includes the "Shanhaijing" (Stassberg 2002, "passim"). Also, "Questions to Heaven" (Stassberg 2002, 11 and Yang "et al" 2005, 8-10). Birds in Chinese mythology Birds in Chinese mythology and legend are of numerous types and very important in this regard. Some of them are obviously based on real birds, other ones obviously not, and some in-between. The Crane is an example of a real type of bird with mythological enhancements.