Interview on “Original Picture Books: Selected Readings and Highlights” (Part 4)

Intro­duc­tion: This is an inter­view pod­cast con­duct­ed on “Pic­ture Book Lol­lipop”, host­ed by Xiaox­i­ang and guest Ajia. Start­ing from the ref­er­ence book “Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books: Select­ed Read­ings and High­lights” pub­lished at the end of 2024, an in-depth con­ver­sa­tion was held around the selec­tion cri­te­ria, his­tor­i­cal con­text, cur­rent themes and future devel­op­ment of orig­i­nal pic­ture books. The record­ing time is on the evening of Jan­u­ary 3, 2025, and the broad­cast time is Jan­u­ary 17, 2025.

The fol­low­ing text is com­piled as an excerpt. To lis­ten to the full pod­cast, please click the fol­low­ing audio link:

Himalaya:38 Dia­logue with Teacher Ajia: Has the Spring of Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books Arrived?Pic­ture Book Lol­lipopFree online read­ing, lis­ten­ing and down­load­ing— Himalayas

Micro­cosm:http://t.cn/A6uDFbvy

Click to open »> Part I | Part 2 | Part 3

[Part 4]

…

All the sto­ries we tell are, in a sense, retellings of clas­sics.
It’s just that many of us haven’t read so many sto­ries, so we always feel that this sto­ry is new and that sto­ry is new to us.
But in my opin­ion, all sto­ries are actu­al­ly old sto­ries.

Xiaox­i­ang:

In addi­tion to the deep­en­ing of the sto­ry and the exten­sion of the mean­ing that you just men­tioned, I also par­tic­u­lar­ly hope to see more diver­si­ty and rich­ness in visu­al expres­sion.

In fact, in terms of folk tra­di­tions, ours are rich­er than those of South Korea and Japan in terms of mate­ri­als and appear­ance.

So when adapt­ing folk tra­di­tions, shouldn’t our orig­i­nal pic­ture books also present a rich­er look than those of our neigh­bor­ing coun­tries?

Ajia:

I think it also comes down to fate. After inter­view­ing many cre­ators, I feel that the cre­ative process real­ly depends on a sense of des­tiny.

For exam­ple, Mr. Nao­ki Mat­sui, the “Father of Pic­ture Books” in Japan, is not only an excel­lent pub­lish­er, but also a very per­cep­tive edi­tor. He often gives com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent sug­ges­tions to dif­fer­ent cre­ators.

For exam­ple, when he met Teacher Cai Gao, she actu­al­ly want­ed to draw some sto­ries about con­tem­po­rary chil­dren’s lives, but Mat­sui Nao told her that she should try to cre­ate more tra­di­tion­al sto­ries and use tra­di­tion­al tech­niques.

When he met Mit­sumasa Anno, he sug­gest­ed that he draw “trav­el pic­ture books” that are more West­ern in style and con­tain more per­son­al feel­ings.

Anoth­er exam­ple is Aka­bane Sue­kichi, the painter of “Suho and the White Horse”. He believes that Aka­bane is most suit­able for cre­at­ing pic­ture books with Japan­ese folk fla­vor.

Nao­ki Mat­sui has a spe­cial sen­si­tiv­i­ty and knows what each cre­ator is best at and what kind of sto­ries they are best suit­ed to telling.

If you have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk to Teacher Cai Gao, you will find that she is par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in sto­ries like “Bao’er” and the themes in “Strange Sto­ries from a Chi­nese Stu­dio” that are a bit dark, elves, and ghosts.

She has her own under­stand­ing and expres­sion of the kind of “dark­ness with light”, mys­te­ri­ous, and even scary things. The heavy writ­ing of human nature is actu­al­ly a bit of mag­i­cal real­ism, right? She is par­tic­u­lar­ly suit­able for telling this kind of sto­ry.

So I think we need this kind of “oppor­tu­ni­ty” — to allow every cre­ator to freely express what he or she wants to say most.

Each per­son may be just a “small group of peo­ple” who are good at express­ing a cer­tain per­spec­tive, a theme, or a cer­tain emo­tion. But as long as these “small groups of peo­ple” can express them­selves freely, our orig­i­nal pic­ture books can form a very diverse ecosys­tem.

Take, for exam­ple, the book “Braids”.

At that time, the edi­to­r­i­al team was dis­cussing whether to include it or not. Many peo­ple hes­i­tat­ed, say­ing that the book was “not inter­est­ing enough for chil­dren” and “the col­or tone was gray”, etc. But I insist­ed on includ­ing it.

Why? Because this book tells a dif­fer­ent sto­ry of child­hood.

Most of our chil­dren’s books want to tell chil­dren how won­der­ful child­hood is, but the real child­hood is not always won­der­ful. Some chil­dren’s child­hood is actu­al­ly very dif­fi­cult.

I know Hei­mi is from Chaoshan, and my moth­er is also from Chaoshan. Every time she recalls her child­hood, she can’t help cry­ing. Espe­cial­ly for women, the pres­sure they endure in the Chaoshan cul­tur­al envi­ron­ment is some­thing that many peo­ple can­not under­stand.

You can’t force them to “sing about their child­hood”, that’s mean­ing­less. Of course, you can’t ask them to describe their child­hood as par­tic­u­lar­ly hor­ri­ble, that’s not nec­es­sary either.

But Braids strikes a bal­ance.

It express­es the pain and strug­gle of child­hood, but also finds a way out in the sto­ry, which is the pow­er of fan­ta­sy, and final­ly there is a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion with grand­ma.

I think this sto­ry has a strong heal­ing pow­er. It may not be a “child­hood sto­ry” in the main­stream sense, but it may res­onate with many peo­ple, and make them feel com­fort­ed and even relieved.

This kind of book should not be ignored.

Of course, I have my own pref­er­ences. But what I hope more is that when our choic­es are diverse enough, we will find that Chi­na has always had diverse cre­ations. It’s just that some aspects are not seen or rec­og­nized in the main­stream con­text.

So I also choose some sto­ries with a bit of “dark­ness”, such as books like “Hap­py Egg Lay­ing”.

Xiaox­i­ang:

We just talked about the adap­ta­tion of tra­di­tion­al folk sto­ries. I would also like to talk to you about the cre­ation of con­tem­po­rary life.

I’m not sure if it’s my per­son­al bias or I haven’t read enough, but I’ve always felt that there don’t seem to be many expres­sions of con­tem­po­rary life in orig­i­nal Chi­nese pic­ture books, espe­cial­ly those that make my eyes light up and sur­prise me, which don’t seem to be com­mon.

Ajia:

It’s dif­fi­cult. Of course it’s dif­fi­cult, do you know?

Look at the book I list­ed in the next arti­cle that best express­es this theme, “Winged Boy”, right? It is a very good book, but it is not easy to keep it for a long time and con­tin­ue to be read by every­one.

This is also true for “Only Child”. If you want to main­tain an objec­tive and truth­ful expres­sion, there will always be some peo­ple who think: Is this not suit­able for chil­dren? Some peo­ple also think it is not “child-friend­ly” enough.

In fact, there have been many debates about the “child­ish­ness” of “Winged Boy”. But some­times, if you real­ly want to express it real­is­ti­cal­ly, it can’t be too fake, right? You can’t just express some good wish­es, but you need to present it objec­tive­ly.

Some sen­tences end­ed up being delet­ed when I was retelling the book.

The sto­ry of “Winged Boy” is about a child from a migrant work­er fam­i­ly in a big city. No mat­ter what he does in school, he will be exclud­ed by oth­er chil­dren because he always smells like cook­ing fumes.

You see, no mat­ter how he behaves, oth­ers always think that he is not a “real city kid.”

But his moth­er had to let him help in the store while watch­ing him do his home­work. Those who came to work always want­ed to talk to the child. In fact, his moth­er was not sim­ply wor­ried that he would be dis­tract­ed, but she did­n’t want him to have too much con­tact with these peo­ple. These sub­tle points were all observed by the cre­ator, Teacher Liu Xun, because her daugh­ter was the child’s class­mate. In the process of help­ing each oth­er, they felt the very warm human­i­ty and also real­ized the side that was par­tic­u­lar­ly dig­ni­fied and wor­thy of respect.

Liu Xun also often par­tic­i­pat­ed in their lives, observed every detail, and then record­ed it as objec­tive­ly as pos­si­ble.

But if we want to talk about these things, we will have many con­cerns. Will it offend peo­ple? Real­is­tic top­ics are real­ly dif­fi­cult to talk about.

Xiaox­i­ang:

I remem­ber that when I read “Only Child”, it real­ly had a great impact on me.

That seemed to be the first time I read “my own sto­ry”.

Because I am of the same gen­er­a­tion as the author, I feel that what she is talk­ing about is my own grow­ing up expe­ri­ence, and this sense of sub­sti­tu­tion is par­tic­u­lar­ly strong.

But I also noticed that there seem to be very few pic­ture books that chil­dren read today that can tru­ly reflect their cur­rent lives. Do you think there will be more and more such works in orig­i­nal pic­ture books in the future?

Ajia:

In fact, the expres­sion of real child­hood life——

If it just shows some­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly beau­ti­ful, is this kind of work still worth pub­lish­ing?

Take, for exam­ple, “Last Stop on Mar­ket Street”. Were you moved after read­ing it? Right?

Some books tell sto­ries of loss, which are equal­ly mov­ing and embody the car­ing part of life.

But if the work lacks real aware­ness of the prob­lem, real obser­va­tions, and valu­able respons­es, then such work will be dif­fi­cult to be con­vinc­ing.

I often say that real­is­tic works often have to “raise ques­tions”, oth­er­wise they become preachy.

When I talked about juve­nile nov­els before, I often said that real juve­nile nov­els are often “prob­lem juve­nile nov­els.”

If a YA nov­el was just about every­thing being won­der­ful, then there would be lit­tle need for it to exist, right?

The rea­son we write a fic­tion­al sto­ry is because there are dif­fi­cul­ties, set­backs or short­com­ings in real­i­ty.

You have to ask ques­tions in your work and then pro­vide some kind of real and mean­ing­ful response, rather than sim­ply paint­ing a pie in the sky and mak­ing the hope look pret­ty.

I’m very hap­py that a Chi­nese juve­nile nov­el was recent­ly trans­lat­ed and pub­lished in Eng­lish. The book is called “The Tilt­ed Sky”. The nov­el tells the sto­ry of a child from a sin­gle-par­ent fam­i­ly and his father, and the rela­tion­ship between the two is very tense. The child has to change guardians sev­er­al times… It’s a very bro­ken growth sto­ry. But when you read to the end, you will feel some­thing real­ly warm.

Xiaox­i­ang:

What do you think of the cur­rent phe­nom­e­non of “famous works adapt­ed into pic­ture books”? To be hon­est, I have read a lot of such pic­ture books, but there are almost no exam­ples that I think are suc­cess­ful.

Ajia:

In fact, after the pub­li­ca­tion of my book “Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books: Select­ed Read­ings and High­lights”, some friends in the indus­try also expressed their opin­ions very tact­ful­ly, say­ing that if they were to write it, they would choose books from the per­spec­tive of “visu­al pri­or­i­ty”.

You see, dif­fer­ent peo­ple have dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives.

As for me, I don’t con­sid­er “beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions” as the pri­ma­ry cri­te­ri­on for choos­ing a book. Of course, good illus­tra­tions are def­i­nite­ly a plus, but for me, the most impor­tant cri­te­ri­on is: the rela­tion­ship between the text and the pic­tures. Is there a “cor­re­spon­dence” between the text and the pic­tures? Is there “progress”? Do they cre­ate a “third sto­ry” togeth­er? This is what I val­ue. Most of the books I choose meet this cri­te­ri­on.

As for some peo­ple’s choice of books, they may focus more on “famous authors” and “famous works”, which is anoth­er sys­tem.

But why do you think this adap­ta­tion is not very suc­cess­ful? It is prob­a­bly because you judge it using the “lan­guage of pic­ture books”. You care about the close­ness between the text and the pic­tures, not whether the pic­tures are sim­ply “icing on the cake”.

Of course, some­times we also need some beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions to appre­ci­ate clas­sics, and I like this kind of books, but that may not be the def­i­n­i­tion of a pic­ture book, it is more like an illus­trat­ed ver­sion of a book.

As a pic­ture book, I par­tic­u­lar­ly empha­size the close coor­di­na­tion between text and pic­tures.

For exam­ple, the sto­ry “Shui Ai” select­ed in my book is adapt­ed from Peng Xue­jun’s nov­el “Waist Gate”. How­ev­er, this adap­ta­tion was not ini­ti­at­ed by the author of the nov­el at all, but two illus­tra­tors took the ini­tia­tive to find the author and said that they par­tic­u­lar­ly liked this sto­ry and want­ed to turn it into a pic­ture book.

They also drew sketch­es, pre­pared drafts, and then sought the author’s approval. So this is actu­al­ly a “visu­al cre­ator-led” adap­ta­tion.

In that book review, I also specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned the dif­fer­ence between pic­ture books and nov­el texts——

There are a lot of psy­cho­log­i­cal descrip­tions and process­es in the nov­el, but these are not suit­able for pic­ture books, so they are basi­cal­ly delet­ed, leav­ing only a very con­cise nar­ra­tive, cou­pled with con­tin­u­ous visu­al nar­ra­tive. The two are matched per­fect­ly, so it becomes a real pic­ture book.

I think this is a “spe­cial case”. It was the illus­tra­tor’s efforts that pushed the adap­ta­tion for­ward and made it a “new work”, just like an adapt­ed movie.

Anoth­er exam­ple is “Spar­row” by Mei Zihan, illus­trat­ed by Man Tao. I think this is Mei’s most suc­cess­ful pic­ture book so far.

Although the text is quite long and basi­cal­ly not edit­ed, there are some blank spaces in the orig­i­nal text, and many places are not ful­ly explained, which leaves room for the nar­ra­tive of the pic­tures. The expres­sion of the pic­tures is very inter­est­ing in mod­ern art.

I think this is a fair­ly suc­cess­ful exam­ple of “adapt­ing famous children’s lit­er­a­ture into pic­ture books.”

Xiaox­i­ang:

Speak­ing of the issue of adap­ta­tion, I would also like to ask anoth­er ques­tion about the his­to­ry of pic­ture book devel­op­ment.

In fact, the devel­op­ment of orig­i­nal­i­ty is close­ly relat­ed to the per­son­al efforts of edi­tors and the progress of the entire indus­try.

So final­ly, could you please talk about some changes you have observed in the domes­tic edit­ing and pub­lish­ing indus­tries in terms of their con­trol over orig­i­nal­i­ty over the years?

Ajia:

In gen­er­al, it can be said that we have entered an “era of orig­i­nal­i­ty”.

After so many years of learn­ing and intro­duc­ing a lot of things, we do feel that we real­ly want to tell our own sto­ries.

On the oth­er hand, from the per­spec­tive of the pub­lish­ing envi­ron­ment, there is an increas­ing desire to “tell good Chi­nese sto­ries.” There­fore, whether from the bot­tom up or from the top down, every­one has a strong desire to invest more resources in orig­i­nal cre­ation.

There­fore, some­times you will see that it seems that a lot of orig­i­nal works are sud­den­ly launched. No mat­ter what the dri­ving rea­son is, at least every­one is encour­ag­ing orig­i­nal­i­ty.

I think this is a process, and we have to accept this stage.

Of course, I will always empha­size one point:We must put orig­i­nal works on the world stage and not cre­ate them behind closed doors.

Over the years, I have come to believe that the most crit­i­cal fac­tor in an orig­i­nal pic­ture book is not the cre­ator, but the edi­tor.

Cre­ators have always been there, whether they are sto­ry writ­ers or painters, tal­ent has always exist­ed.

But tru­ly excel­lent and mature pic­ture books often depend on edi­tors. If the edi­tor is unqual­i­fied, per­haps a good idea will be messed up or even direct­ly ruin a good work.

Some­times, edi­tors even tell cre­ators, “Just draw like oth­ers do.”

This kind of edit­ing may very like­ly ruin a promis­ing cre­ator.

The worst thing for a cre­ator is to imi­tate oth­ers from the begin­ning. Once you give peo­ple this impres­sion — your cre­ation seems to be imi­tat­ing some­one’s style — maybe you can still sell one or two books with this style, but you will no longer be your­self.

Every­one should have some­thing they want to say and their own way of express­ing them­selves.

At present, the edi­to­r­i­al teams of some domes­tic pub­lish­ing hous­es are indeed grow­ing grad­u­al­ly.

The best way to help edi­tors grow is to let them pro­duce suc­cess­ful works that sat­is­fy them.

Only with such expe­ri­ence can they con­tin­ue to accu­mu­late, improve, and cre­ate more good works.

Rather than get­ting hung up on the details, think about how to help them cre­ate a good first book.

As long as they pro­duce a suc­cess­ful work, pos­i­tive feed­back will come, which will encour­age them to keep work­ing hard.

When I wrote this book, “Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books: Select­ed Read­ings and High­lights”, I actu­al­ly want­ed to achieve a pos­i­tive feed­back effect.

In recent years, I have writ­ten a lot of book reviews on orig­i­nal pic­ture books, from short reviews to long reviews. In the past, I wrote more about import­ed works, but now I write more about orig­i­nal works.

I know that some works may still have short­com­ings, and may not be as good as some clas­sic import­ed pic­ture books, but I hope that every­one can see their advan­tages, appre­ci­ate their suc­cess­ful side, and give some pos­i­tive feed­back, so that cre­ators may do bet­ter and bet­ter.

This is the basic start­ing point for me to write this book.

I also think that read­ers can actu­al­ly do more. If you see some­thing good, be bold and praise it.

“I was deeply moved after read­ing this book!”

“This page is so well drawn!”

“This is a bril­liant treat­ment!”

In this way, cre­ators will know which efforts have elicit­ed pos­i­tive respons­es from read­ers or crit­ics, so they will con­tin­ue on this path or even go fur­ther in future works.

In gen­er­al, more and more good books have been pub­lished in recent years, and some edi­tors of orig­i­nal pic­ture books have real­ly grown up. This makes me par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py. As long as they can per­sist in doing so, as long as the mar­ket con­tin­ues to give them oppor­tu­ni­ties…

But it would be a shame if any of them changed careers.

The excel­lent edi­tors we have cul­ti­vat­ed with great dif­fi­cul­ty must be pro­tect­ed.

Not only cre­ators, but edi­tors also need pro­tec­tion.

On the one hand, read­ers of orig­i­nal pic­ture books need more encour­age­ment, and on the oth­er hand, they also need more pos­i­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion and feed­back.

Even if it is crit­i­cism, it must be con­struc­tive crit­i­cism:

“Could this place be bet­ter?”

Rather than: “This book is absolute trash.”

That kind of crit­i­cism is worth­less, right?

Xiaox­i­ang:

In fact, as a media per­son, I also tru­ly feel that our read­ers are very wel­com­ing to orig­i­nal pic­ture books.

Before record­ing the pod­cast, I did some sta­tis­tics. For exam­ple, we have rec­om­mend­ed more than 50 orig­i­nal pic­ture books on Lol­lipop’s new book list in recent years.

We have talked for a long time today. Thank you very much, Mr. Ajia!

I also espe­cial­ly rec­om­mend every­one to read Teacher Ajia’s “Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books: Select­ed Read­ings and High­lights”, which is real­ly a great book!

So let’s stop here for today.

Ajia:

Thank you! Thank you Xiaox­i­ang! Thank you every­one!

(The above is the fourth part, the full text is over)