Asian Content for Asia's Children

From Tots to Teens, StarMag

THE Asian Festival of Children’s Content in Singapore proved to be a truly inspiring experience for me.

Held from May 6-9 at the beautiful Arts House at the Old Parliament, the festival brought together professionals from various publishing industries – from print to film to software. What these people had in common, of course, was a passion and interest in creating content specifically for children and young adults.

 As you can guess, my interest was particularly in connecting with editors, publishers, writers and illustrators from near and far, many of whose work I have admired for many years, and some of whom I have had contact with through email and their blogs.

One such woman is Rukhsana Kahn, an author and storyteller from Canada. I first heard of Kahn when I was sent the online link (tinyurl.com/37wchbu) to the paper (Freedom of Speech Versus Cultural Sensitivity: Balancing the Right to Create Freely vs. the Need of People to be Respected) that she presented at the IBBY World Congress 2008 in Copenhagen, Denmark. What a great presentation! Reading it, I was struck by Kahn’s passion, her intelligence, sensitivity and sense of humour. In person, Kahn more than surpassed my expectations. She is one of the most eloquent and entertaining people I hav  e ever met, and I was deeply honoured, very grateful (and a little mortified) when she generously took the time to give me some much-needed advice on my own presentation style.

I was also thrilled when she said how much she liked the first book published by my imprint OneRedFlower Press. The book, My Mother’s Garden was launched at the festival. The author/illustrator Emila Yusof was not able to attend, but the publisher Linda Tan Lingard and I displayed the book and spoke about the imprint and our hopes to publish Malaysian children’s and YA literature, and, in time, books that celebrate other cultures too.

When I was first shown Emila’s mock-up of My Mother’s Garden, the little girl in it was dressed in jeans and a sweater. I asked Emila to dress her in a baju kurung instead, to better reflect the fact that she is a little Malaysian girl – the flowers and other plants in the garden show the local setting of the story. I didn’t think the girl would look odd in a baju kurung as many little Malay girls still wear this outfit. And also, Malaysian girls and women of all races do too, including as a school uniform.

Textwise, Emila had written a simple narrative, but also composed rhyming verses for every picture spread. It is very hard to rhyme well. Unless you’re very good at it, there’s a danger that your text will end up sounding forced, clumsy or just plain cheesy. And so I removed the rhyming text, and Emila and I worked to improve the narrative, adding more descriptive details to the text. However, as I felt that the flowers and the little girl’s appearance were enough to give this book a thoroughly Malaysian feel, I refrained from adding any pointedly Malaysian references within the narrative. However, the book ends with an illustrated glossary of the flowers and plants, with their English and Malay names.

My Mother’s Garden suffers from a slight oversight in that its spine doesn’t bear its title. This will make it hard to pick out when it’s sitting spine-out on bookshelves. Well, as Linda said to me, let’s hope it goes into second printing so we can add the title then!

The theme of the festival was Asian Content for the World’s Children and there was much discussion about ways to close the gaps between the world’s reading communities. While it’s true that a good book is able to transcend all kinds of borders, its merit isn’t the only thing that determines how wide an audience it garners. You still have to think about things like publicity and distribution rights.

It has always struck me as odd that we get so few Australian books in our stores. Australia is so close to Malaysia and so many Malaysians have emigrated to Australia, or have gone to school there, that it would just make sense for us to have more access to its literature.

I was on a panel that discussed Asian-Australian collaboration, and I mentioned how I grew up hearing jokes about Australia being a land of convicts, and remarks about how Australian indigenous people were uncivilised, lazy, and ungrateful. These views, shared with me by friends and relatives who had studied in Australian universities or emigrated to that country, show how any single story of any community can do so much damage.

I said that, to me, one of the most important reasons to promote artistic collaboration between countries is to promote access and exposure to the many stories of our countries and our peoples.

It’s also an important reason to publish Malaysian stories for Malaysians, since the stereotypes we are exposed to and have come to believe in are not just of people in other countries and of other cultures, but also of the people with whom we share neighbourhoods, study and work with; people whom we even marry and whose families and communities we become a part of.

I don’t want to see less of the wonderful books published every year in the States and Britain – our reading lives would be a lot less rich without them. We just need other stories too. Stories from India, from China and Japan and Korea, from Singapore and other ASEAN nations, from Australia, from Africa, from Polynesia and beyond. Asian content for the world, yes, but most importantly and urgently, Asian content for Asia.