[Reprint] [The Road to Original Chinese]: Taiwanese Picture Books from a Scholar’s Perspective 4

The three pic­ture books from Tai­wan rec­om­mend­ed by Teacher Zhu in her article—“My Bicy­cle and I,” “Catch­ing Tad­poles on Wednes­day After­noon,” and “I Became a Charizard”—are all my favorites! “My Bicy­cle and I” recent­ly had a sim­pli­fied Chi­nese edi­tion pub­lished in main­land Chi­na.Orig­i­nal address:[The Path to Orig­i­nal Chi­nese]: Tai­wanese Pic­ture Books from a Schol­ar’s Per­spec­tive, Part 4: Artis­tic Expres­sion of Chil­dren’s Per­spec­tivesauthor:Feng Zikai’s Chil­dren’s Pic­ture Books
 

Edi­tor’s Note: To pro­mote the social impact of the Feng Zikai Chil­dren’s Pic­ture Book Award and allow more read­ers to dis­cov­er all the win­ning works, the orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee has curat­ed a spe­cial fea­ture on the offi­cial blog and Wei­bo plat­form, “The Path of Orig­i­nal Chi­nese Pic­ture Books,” as the sec­ond award announce­ment approach­es. We have invit­ed renowned schol­ars and pro­mot­ers from across Tai­wan, Hong Kong, and Tai­wan to review the recent his­to­ry of orig­i­nal Chi­nese pic­ture books. Let us remem­ber these pio­neers who have left a lega­cy for chil­dren and made the world of orig­i­nal pic­ture books shine bright­ly.

Char­ac­ter­is­tics of Tai­wanese pic­ture books

——Tak­ing the win­ning works of the first Feng Zikai Chil­dren’s Pic­ture Book Com­pe­ti­tion as an exam­ple
By Zhu Ziqiang
 

We have pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed the char­ac­ter­is­tics of Tai­wanese pic­ture books: “rich in cre­ativ­i­ty” and “flu­ent in nar­ra­tive”.The third point, and a very impor­tant one, is “the artis­tic expres­sion of children’s per­spec­tives.”

As the name of the “Feng Zikai Chil­dren’s Pic­ture Book Award” sug­gests, “chil­dren” is both the start­ing point and the end point. Dur­ing the judg­ing process, we found some pic­ture books that we felt were excel­lent, but the only draw­back was that they lacked a child’s per­spec­tive. I think Tai­wanese pic­ture books do a rel­a­tive­ly good job of empha­siz­ing the impor­tance of embrac­ing chil­dren’s psy­cho­log­i­cal per­spec­tives, emo­tions, and aspi­ra­tions in their artis­tic expres­sion. In the award judg­ing process, one cri­te­ri­on we judges unan­i­mous­ly agreed on was “chil­dren’s per­spec­tive.” You must take a child’s per­spec­tive and express chil­dren’s psy­chol­o­gy, emo­tions, and aspi­ra­tions.

   
I think the Excel­lence Award-win­ning book “Me and My Bicy­cle,” writ­ten and illus­trat­ed by Andrew Yeh, excels in its “chil­dren’s per­spec­tive.” It has a unique, fairy­tale-like open­ing, akin to a sto­ry’s intro­duc­tion that serves as a con­cise out­line. The intro­duc­tion begins with a lit­tle boy say­ing, “Grand­pa, why do you clean the teapot every day?” “It’s not a teapot, it’s a mag­ic lamp.” “Aladdin’s mag­ic lamp?” “Any­thing, the kind you can make three wish­es with.” “You’re lying!” “When has Grand­pa ever lied to you?”“So what did you wish for?”“Only chil­dren can make wish­es; wish­es made by the elder­ly will not come true.”“What wish did you make as a child?”“Grow up quick­ly, it’s very clever. Look, I turned into an old grand­pa in an instant.”The dia­logue in this intro­duc­tion is fol­lowed by a fol­low-up at the end, where the lit­tle boy makes his third wish, “Grow up quick­ly, but not get old too quick­ly.” The sto­ry of the pic­ture book is actu­al­ly very com­pli­cat­ed. 

   
Then, the child stole Grand­pa’s mag­ic lamp and made a wish.“I want to draw it very sim­i­lar­ly in case the mag­ic lamp makes a mis­take.”What kind of pic­ture did you draw? There is a bicy­cle on the pic­ture.“My first wish is to buy a bicy­cle like this, my sec­ond wish is to buy it as soon as pos­si­ble, and the third wish is to keep it for now and use it when I think of it.”Lat­er he also used the wish intro­duced ear­li­er. I think this book cap­tures the“grow­ing up”This is the core theme of chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture. As a pic­ture book, it has a lot of pages. I count­ed them and there are a total of50Mul­ti­ple pages, which pro­vides enough space for growth“con­tain­er”.“con­tain­er”With­out a rich, devel­oped, and com­plex sto­ry, it’s dif­fi­cult to cap­ture the psy­cho­log­i­cal trans­for­ma­tions and changes that chil­dren under­go as they grow. I think the author, in por­tray­ing the theme of growth, del­i­cate­ly depicts the chil­dren’s minds and aspi­ra­tions through words and illus­tra­tions. Read­ing this book, I can sense this growth, this strength, that comes from with­in the child. Adults may pro­vide some sup­port for their inner strength, but the ulti­mate strength comes from with­in. This is one of the main rea­sons I love this book. 

  



 
In addi­tion, this book is also full of child­ish­ness. For exam­ple, there is an inter­est­ing nar­ra­tion at the begin­ning:“My class­mates often ask me to go out for a bike ride. My mom always tells me not to ride too fast. I sim­ply can’t ride fast and always come in last. It’s not because my tech­nique is bad, but because my bike is too big.”The class­mates all rode to the front, some of them delib­er­ate­ly rode to the front and then stopped to laugh at him, then ran very far away, leav­ing him far behind, but in the end he said:“In the end, you still have to stop and wait for me.”In fact, the class­mate did­n’t stop to wait for him; the train was block­ing his way. Then I wrote about his desire to buy a new bicy­cle that would suit him. Due to time con­straints, I only cap­tured a few excerpts and can’t intro­duce them in full.“Days go by, and why don’t I have a new bike?”Look at how big the bicy­cle is. To us adults, the wish in a child’s heart is just a bicy­cle, but in the child’s heart, that hope is so big. How big is it?——Have you ever been pun­ished to stand in the class­room because you were dis­tract­ed by your bicy­cle? While you were being pun­ished, you were still think­ing:“Why didn’t my wish come true?”“I dream even dur­ing the day”.
The cre­ativ­i­ty of pic­ture books comes again here. This is a group of birds.But how could a flock of birds final­ly fly into the shape of a bicy­cle? This is an exag­ger­at­ed expres­sion, a sur­re­al­ism, but some­times, it is the exag­ger­at­ed and deformed art that can bet­ter reveal the essence of life. In this way, we can under­stand that in his eyes, the fly­ing birds are all in the shape of a bicy­cle. This desire is too strong. In the end, his moth­er told him that if he gets 100 points in the exam and ranks among the top three, I will buy it for him. As a result, he worked very hard and final­ly“Nor­mal­ly I couldn’t even get tenth place in the exam, but this time I worked real­ly hard and actu­al­ly got full marks.”“Afraid that my moth­er would change her mind, I ran all the way home from school.”“When my moth­er saw the test paper, she was as hap­py as I was. But when I men­tioned the bicy­cle, she put away her smile and told a sto­ry. She said that when she was a child, she felt ashamed for not hav­ing shoes to wear. Until one day she saw a beg­gar who did­n’t even have legs, she real­ized that she could be hap­py even if she was bare­foot.”I think this moth­er is real­ly rea­son­able.“I don’t know if the sto­ry is true, but I know that my moth­er works real­ly hard and often works until mid­night.”So, he made a deci­sion that he could­n’t believe him­self, which was to buy new crayons. He paint­ed the bicy­cle red, and he said “I have new crayons and a new bike, how nice.”There is also a paint­ing of him rid­ing this bicy­cle with a string tied to the back of the frame, and a kite on the string. The kite is made of the paint­ing of the bicy­cle he longed for.

I think this book also uses mean­ing­ful pic­tures to express growth.“Mean­ing­ful pic­tures”In fact, it is the artist’s cre­ativ­i­ty and design. For exam­ple, these two paint­ings,Let’s take a look. Is there any change between this pic­ture and this one? Oh, the way he rides the bicy­cle. You can see it very care­ful­ly. What I want to say is that his body has grown. But can we see that his mind has grown? We can see that too. This pic­ture is actu­al­ly very inter­est­ing. Every­one, please note that this kite is made of the paint­ing of the bicy­cle when he made the wish. Look at this paint­ing,“Afraid that my moth­er would change her mind, I ran all the way home from school.”How fast he runs! Faster than this pup­py. I think faster than this motor­cy­cle too. It’s too exag­ger­at­ed, but if it’s not exag­ger­at­ed, it’s not enough to express his eager­ness.

 


 
“Catch­ing Tad­poles on Wednes­day After­noon” and “My Bicy­cle and I” are both sto­ries writ­ten from a child’s per­spec­tive. Lai Ma’s “Now Do You Know Who I Am?” is a chil­dren’s pic­ture book with a play­ful ele­ment, and I think it also exem­pli­fies a child’s per­spec­tive.

His work, “I Became a Charizard!”, address­es chil­dren’s psy­chol­o­gy and emo­tions. Time con­straints pre­vent us from dis­cussing this in detail. Paint­ing itself is sim­i­lar. We just dis­cussed the bird trans­form­ing into a bicy­cle, which also reflects a child’s per­spec­tive. Paint­ing should also reflect a child’s per­spec­tive. An Shili­u’s paint­ings, she says, draw inspi­ra­tion from the style of Tai­wanese grass­roots artist Hong Tong.Hong Tong’s paint­ing style actu­al­ly has a very child­ish and naive qual­i­ty, shar­ing many sim­i­lar­i­ties with chil­dren’s paint­ings. In this paint­ing, I think a child’s mind can tran­scend time and space, as demon­strat­ed here. The teacher’s sali­va becomes rain on their heads.Every­one, pay atten­tion. Where is this child walk­ing? This com­po­si­tion isn’t the nor­mal way adults would draw. If an adult were to draw this, they’d be walk­ing on the road. Instead, they’re all walk­ing on a line. Here, they’re on the line. And then there’s a pud­dle, and they’re also walk­ing on that line. This is the feel of a child’s draw­ing. We just men­tioned how the child’s arms sud­den­ly become longer, and this one also sud­den­ly becomes very long. Anoth­er point is that there’s only a head and arms, no body. When the child wants to express some­thing, they focus on this point. This is the kind of artis­tic expres­sion a child uses. They don’t care about any­thing else, so the body isn’t nec­es­sary. When it’s need­ed, it’s when the boy is catch­ing tad­poles with his fish­ing net. When he’s swim­ming in the water, his body appears. And when he’s sit­ting, it appears.

 

Zhu Ziqiang:Pro­fes­sor at Ocean Uni­ver­si­ty of Chi­na, Dean of the School of Lit­er­a­ture and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and Direc­tor of the Insti­tute of Chil­dren’s Lit­er­a­ture. Mem­ber of the judg­ing com­mit­tee for the first Feng Zikai Chil­dren’s Pic­ture Book Award.