Interview on “Original Picture Books: Selected Readings and Highlights” (Part 2)

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 1

[Part 2]

…

So I had a basic idea at that time: if we were to write the first book on the com­pi­la­tion of orig­i­nal pic­ture books, we must not miss those basic books.

This was my ini­tial start­ing point.

Xiaox­i­ang:

Was the process of draft­ing your list of 62 books quick? Or did you actu­al­ly think about it for a long time?

Among these 62 books, which one or which ones do you think are the most dif­fi­cult to choose? And which ones can you decide very quick­ly and feel that “this is a must-have”? Can you give some exam­ples?

Ajia:

We prob­a­bly start­ed this in 2021. The time­line I record­ed start­ed in April 2021. When I was sure I was going to do it, I actu­al­ly had a list in my mind because I had been prepar­ing for it over the years.

But I still have to con­vince every­one, I need a good rea­son. I cer­tain­ly don’t say that I have already decid­ed “these are the books”, but I have an idea why I chose these books. This idea can actu­al­ly be traced back to 2005 to 2006, when it was already in its infan­cy.

Why do I say so?

If we want to make a basic book list, we must have a per­spec­tive that is rec­og­nized by the pub­lic, author­i­ta­tive recog­ni­tion, or pub­lic recog­ni­tion, and also have a cer­tain degree of cred­i­bil­i­ty.

You know, when Pro­fes­sor Peng Yi was work­ing on the book “World Pic­ture Book Read­ing and Clas­sics”, he actu­al­ly did a very impor­tant basic work, which was to look up the awards these clas­sic works have won in his­to­ry. For exam­ple, this writer won the Inter­na­tion­al Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen Award, that book won the Calde­cott Gold Medal, the Green­away Medal, or oth­er impor­tant awards. If a work has so many awards, its “clas­si­cism” is usu­al­ly more guar­an­teed, right?

Anoth­er impor­tant ref­er­ence is the best-sell­ing data over the years. For exam­ple, The Cat That Lived a Mil­lion Times has sold two mil­lion copies or more. This is some­thing that can­not be avoid­ed, right?

In short, data such as awards and sales vol­ume is a very impor­tant ref­er­ence dimen­sion.

At that time, because many of the books select­ed by Peng Yi were in Eng­lish, I basi­cal­ly helped to look up the award infor­ma­tion. I also did some­thing very char­ac­ter­is­tic of a “legal per­son” at that time — because I am quite strong in sci­ence. The start­ing point of doing this was to make a data­base. In 2005, I com­piled a data­base of the win­ners of the world (espe­cial­ly the Unit­ed States) pic­ture book awards over the years. I would check every book in the data­base. If a book has won enough awards, then its clas­sic sta­tus can­not be ignored. This is the most objec­tive basis.

Of course, there are some books that may not have won any par­tic­u­lar­ly big awards, but have been repeat­ed­ly cit­ed or men­tioned in many research papers and mono­graphs, so they should also be regard­ed as “nat­ur­al clas­sics.”

Anoth­er basis is the huge sales vol­ume.

So based on this idea, when we were work­ing on the book “Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Book: Select­ed Read­ings and High­lights”, we also did a sim­i­lar thing — it took us near­ly half a year to sort out the bib­li­og­ra­phy.

Because we had to con­vince each oth­er, and I had to con­vince the edi­to­r­i­al team. At that time, Mr. Bai even con­sid­ered whether to hold a meet­ing and invite some author­i­ta­tive peo­ple to dis­cuss it. Lat­er, this meet­ing did not take place. I am not par­tic­u­lar­ly clear about the spe­cif­ic rea­sons. But a very impor­tant point is: the more peo­ple par­tic­i­pate, the more com­pli­cat­ed the per­spec­tives, and the more things you have to weigh.

In the end, I still stuck to my basic start­ing point: since this is the first time to do such a basic work, we will first use objec­tive data as the stan­dard.

At the end of this book, we actu­al­ly list some of the awards that we focused on. If you are inter­est­ed, you can take a look. Includ­ing the Feng Zikai Award, the Xinyi Award, and many oth­er dif­fer­ent awards. We try not to miss impor­tant works in these awards. If a book does not win these awards, but we still decide to include it, it is because it has some spe­cial fea­tures.

For exam­ple, there are unique ways of expres­sion. We actu­al­ly had a book writ­ten, called “Pen­guin Ice Book”, and its print­ing mate­r­i­al was very spe­cial. But in the end, due to licens­ing rea­sons, we were unable to obtain the copy­right, so we had to give up.

There are also some books that have not won any big awards, but I think it is very nec­es­sary to include them. For exam­ple, “Hap­py Eggs” is spe­cial in that it tells a sto­ry based on real events in a very child-friend­ly way. Although it did not win any big awards, I am still will­ing to include it.

Of course, this is an indi­vid­ual case. Most of the select­ed works have won impor­tant awards at least at home and abroad.

Chi­na’s cur­rent award sys­tem for orig­i­nal pic­ture books has basi­cal­ly been grad­u­al­ly estab­lished since 2015. It would be a pity if even these award-win­ning works were not includ­ed.

There are also those who are rec­og­nized as impor­tant cre­ators, espe­cial­ly those who have made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the devel­op­ment of orig­i­nal pic­ture books, such as teach­ers Xiong Liang, Cai Gao, and Zhu Chengliang. Their works should be includ­ed at least two books. But you will find that even if two books are includ­ed, it is still not enough to reflect their real con­tri­bu­tions.

For exam­ple, I could­n’t include “The Sto­ry of Peach Blos­som Spring” because it was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Japan. There are also many oth­er excel­lent books by Teacher Cai Gao, includ­ing “Meng Jiangnu Cry­ing at the Great Wall”, which I like very much, but I did­n’t include it. This is a great regret for me.

But in gen­er­al, it is still a bal­ance in the end. We have estab­lished some basic prin­ci­ples, such as no more than two works per cre­ator, which is a bot­tom line — after all, this is the first time we have done this kind of work.

Xiaox­i­ang:

You just men­tioned Cai Gao’s “The Sto­ry of Peach Blos­som Spring”, so I would like to ask a relat­ed ques­tion. In the begin­ning of your book, you actu­al­ly talked about the def­i­n­i­tion of “orig­i­nal pic­ture books”. I think we can talk about this con­cept.

Because dif­fer­ent peo­ple have dif­fer­ent under­stand­ings of the so-called “orig­i­nal pic­ture book”, and I think your def­i­n­i­tion in the book is very clear.

But I still have some ques­tions and would like to ask you.

For exam­ple, you men­tioned that if a book is cre­at­ed by a Chi­nese, even if it is first pub­lished abroad, you actu­al­ly include it in the scope of this book. In your def­i­n­i­tion of this book, orig­i­nal pic­ture books include such sit­u­a­tions.

But in my under­stand­ing, if it is not edit­ed and pub­lished by a Chi­nese pub­lish­er, it seems that it is dif­fi­cult to be con­sid­ered an “orig­i­nal pic­ture book.” Although it is cre­at­ed by Chi­nese peo­ple, this mat­ter itself seems to be more com­pli­cat­ed.

So why do you think they should be includ­ed?

Ajia:

This is actu­al­ly a ques­tion of “lenien­cy” or “strict­ness”.

If you define orig­i­nal­i­ty pure­ly based on the place of pub­li­ca­tion — in fact, for exam­ple, Mark Janssen’s “Lit­tle Island” was pub­lished entire­ly in Chi­na, but no one has ever regard­ed it as an orig­i­nal Chi­nese pic­ture book, right?

For exam­ple, “Lit­tle Chick­en House” (Are­vik Dol [Arme­nia]) is such a good book, but it will not be con­sid­ered as an orig­i­nal pic­ture book in any award selec­tion I par­tic­i­pat­ed in.

But the prob­lem is that they were indeed edit­ed and pub­lished in Chi­na for the first time, and have nev­er been pub­lished abroad. So why don’t we regard them as orig­i­nal pic­ture books?

This is a very inter­est­ing ques­tion. In fact, we Chi­nese have a more com­pli­cat­ed under­stand­ing of the con­cept of “orig­i­nal­i­ty”.

In the past, there was a tech­ni­cal def­i­n­i­tion that any copy­right­ed book that was “intro­duced under a con­tract” could not be con­sid­ered an orig­i­nal pic­ture book. This is the rule in some orig­i­nal­i­ty award selec­tions.

But I tell you, “Xinyi orig­i­nal pic­ture books” may actu­al­ly be “import­ed” — because they are first reg­is­tered in Tai­wan and then pub­lished in main­land Chi­na. Does that mean that all Xiny­i’s “orig­i­nal pic­ture books” are not orig­i­nal? Do you think this is rea­son­able?

We have been say­ing that “Tai­wan is an inalien­able part of Chi­na”!

There­fore, some­times it is rather embar­rass­ing to dis­cuss the issue of “orig­i­nal­i­ty” in Chi­na, and it is easy to get caught up in some messy argu­ments if you are not care­ful.

My own under­stand­ing is this. Because I stud­ied law, you will see that I defined “orig­i­nal pic­ture books” in the first part of this book.

What is this? It is the “con­sti­tu­tion” of this book, the fun­da­men­tal law. I will first make the stan­dard clear. You may dis­agree, and you may write a paper to crit­i­cize or oppose my def­i­n­i­tion, but I will not be ambigu­ous or eva­sive. I will clear­ly tell you how I define it and why I define it that way.

If you have your own def­i­n­i­tion sys­tem, that’s great too. You might as well write a book to explain your point of view — I would wel­come that!

To be hon­est, this way of defin­ing is also a “Chi­nese char­ac­ter­is­tic”. Let me give you the sim­plest exam­ple. Guo Jing’s “Only Child” was first pub­lished in the Unit­ed States. Why in the Unit­ed States? Because there is no pub­lish­er in Chi­na, it’s that sim­ple. What sto­ry did she write? It describes the state and state of mind of the only chil­dren of our gen­er­a­tion born in the 1980s. Where is the back­ground of the sto­ry? In Taiyuan, where Guo Jing lived in the 1980s.

You said, if such a book can­not be called “orig­i­nal”, then what is “orig­i­nal”? And she com­plet­ed her cre­ation in Taiyuan.

In the past, we had to pub­lish many books over­seas. For exam­ple, Bao­er, for­mer­ly known as Fox Spir­it in the Wild Gar­den, was pub­lished as Bao­er in Tai­wan. At that time, the pub­lish­ing envi­ron­ment for our pic­ture books was not very mature. The ver­sion of Nezha Con­quers the Drag­on King by Yu Dawu, which won the Japan­ese Grand Prize, was also pub­lished in Japan first.

“The Sto­ry of Peach Blos­som Spring” — If we can’t even con­sid­er a book like this orig­i­nal, then how unfor­tu­nate is that?

So I list­ed three key ele­ments in the book: author, illus­tra­tor, and place of pub­li­ca­tion. I think as long as one of them is from main­land Chi­na, I will include the book.

Of course, there are some books that can be con­sid­ered “Chi­nese orig­i­nals”, such as “The Island” and “The Chick­en House”. From the prin­ci­ple of ter­ri­to­ri­al­i­ty, they are both Chi­nese orig­i­nals. But they do not have par­tic­u­lar­ly obvi­ous “Chi­nese char­ac­ter­is­tics” in their con­tent. So I think they can be intro­duced lat­er. I have many oth­er books on hand that I can talk about first.

This is a “tech­ni­cal treat­ment”: I will not intro­duce this type of work for the time being. In the future, per­haps I can write a book to intro­duce those “for­eign works pub­lished in Chi­na for the first time.”

Xiaox­i­ang:

This is also a very inter­est­ing lit­tle top­ic.

My next ques­tion is about the time def­i­n­i­tion of the books in your “Next Part: Excel­lent Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books”.

What impressed me most was that the first book was The Car­rot is Back, pub­lished in 1955, which is the one writ­ten by Fang Yiqun. The sec­ond book was Mom, Buy Green Beans, pub­lished in 1988.

At that time, I felt real­ly emo­tion­al: Oh my God, it took more than 30 years to get to the sec­ond book!

If The Return of Radish can be regard­ed as the start­ing point of con­tem­po­rary Chi­nese orig­i­nal pic­ture books, then it has been more than 30 years since the first one. Have we run out of books in these 30 years?

Speak­ing of the first book “The Return of Radish”, was there no orig­i­nal pic­ture book that met your def­i­n­i­tion before it?

Ajia:

This is actu­al­ly a ques­tion that is both com­plex and sim­ple.

Strict­ly speak­ing, if we look at the time point, the one pub­lished in 1955 is indeed a pic­ture book orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in main­land Chi­na. Of the sec­ond one, only “Bao Er” is actu­al­ly a main­land orig­i­nal work, but its orig­i­nal ver­sion was “Hu Jing in the Wild Gar­den”, which was pub­lished in 1991.

The next book cre­at­ed and pub­lished by a main­land Chi­nese cre­ator was actu­al­ly Lit­tle Stone Lion in 2005. How­ev­er, Lit­tle Stone Lion was also orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Tai­wan.

So you see, from 1988 to 2005, the works includ­ed in my book were basi­cal­ly pub­lished in Tai­wan first. Even “The Fox Spir­it in the Wild Gar­den” was pub­lished under the name “Bao Er”, which was first pub­lished in Tai­wan and then repub­lished in main­land Chi­na.

This phe­nom­e­non is real­ly very Chi­nese.

So why did I choose this?

I once explained at a press con­fer­ence that this book is main­ly about orig­i­nal pic­ture books from main­land Chi­na since 2000, because the his­to­ry before 2000 is actu­al­ly quite com­pli­cat­ed.

“The Return of Radish” from 1955 is main­ly used here as a sym­bol­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tive to illus­trate that before 2000, we actu­al­ly had orig­i­nal pic­ture books.

But I did not elab­o­rate on this part. In “Part 1: Read­ing Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books”, I wrote about some his­tor­i­cal devel­op­ments and men­tioned many orig­i­nal pic­ture books pub­lished before 2000. But in “Part 2: Fine Orig­i­nal Pic­ture Books”, I chose to leave this sec­tion com­plete­ly blank, and I want­ed to leave it to Teacher Wang Zhi­geng to write.

Every time I see him, I have to “urge him to fin­ish the man­u­script” (laughs), because I think he has to write a book like this.

He has a very rich accu­mu­la­tion of infor­ma­tion. Dur­ing his tenure as the head of the Nation­al Library’s Col­lec­tion and Chil­dren’s Library, he had already start­ed a lot of sol­id work. He also took the lead in plan­ning a series of books called “100 Years of 100 Clas­sic Chi­nese Chil­dren’s Pic­ture Books”. The ear­li­est book in this series is “Hip­po Kinder­garten” pub­lished in 1923. In fact, there are indeed some pic­ture books from the Repub­lic of Chi­na peri­od that can be repro­duced.

But before 2000, the most influ­en­tial book, the one whose pro­to­type can still be seen today, was The Return of Radish, pub­lished in 1955. There are more than 40 ver­sions of this book in the world, and some of them are sell­ing very well. It has become a world-class phe­nom­e­non.

Every­one thinks that this book is a long-stand­ing folk tale, but in fact it is an orig­i­nal work by a Chi­nese writer in 1955, and it is adapt­ed from a sto­ry in the Bat­tle of Shang­gan­ling dur­ing The Kore­an War.

(The above is the sec­ond part, to be con­tin­ued)