Interview with Adeline Foo
by Marjorie Coughlan

Singaporean Adeline Foo received the inaugural First Time Writers & Illustrators Publishing Initiative Award in 2006, given by the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA) and the National Book Development Council of Singapore.  Since then, she has written many more picture books, including a series of heritage books to showcase the unique Chinese-Malay-Eurasian hybrid culture of the Singapore Peranakans.

All three books in Adeline's middle-grade Diary of Amos Lee series have sat for more than a year on Singapore's The Straits Times' bestseller lists. The first, I Sit, I Write, I Flush! also won the inaugural Red Dot award given by the International Schools Libraries Network, a children's choice award. Her most recent book, Whoopie Lee, Almost Famous, about Amos Lee's sister, has also become a best-seller.

Several of Adeline's books for early readers have been adapted into animation shorts and aired on OKTO, Singapore Kids’ TV Channel. 

Adeline lives in Singapore with her husband and three children.

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Your first of many books, Ben’s Friends from the Rainforest was published in 2006 following its winning the inaugural First Time Writers & Illustrators Publishing Initiative Award (FTWIPI).  What did the award mean to you and can you describe your path to becoming a best-selling children’s author?

It was a pleasant way to enter the publishing scene. Imagine having your first manuscript produced!  We received S$8,000 to have the book illustrated, designed and printed. The grant also supported the marketing of the book. I only hit the bestseller list in 2009, after having written twelve picture books. Amos Lee was the first of my books to get on the list – so really, since 2006, it had taken me three years! I’ve always found writing easy. In school, I did well in compositions (creative writing). I studied humanities in college, but it was only in my second job, when I was 24 years old, that I found my calling.  I cut my teeth in the world of PR and advertising.  From 1995 to 2008, I spent the best part of my career in advertising and PR, in both the private and public sectors. Writing is paramount in PR; I think I honed my skills while serving on the job.

Your two stories about Ben included in the book were released as animated cartoons in 2008, and since then, two more of your books Secret Hoarder and Lost in the Secret Garden have also been made into cartoons.  How do you see the relationship between each book and its cartoon; and in general, what future do you see for picture books in our multi-media world?

We were lucky in that soon after our picture books were published, there was an animation push by the Media Development Authority; the media people wanted to support made-in-Singapore animation content.  Hence, most of the FTWIPI recipients got their stories made into cartoons and aired on TV!  In reality, I think that, without funding from the authorities, a first-time writer or artist would not have made it so fast in crossing from print to screen.  So our timing in getting our Award was timely. I know in five years’ time, the scene for e-books or e-publishing is going to change drastically.  People are talking about audio books and books on iPhone.  Even kids as young as two are able to navigate around an ipad, so there may come a day where only classics get re-issued in print, because they have justified their shelf life in the children’s book market, but for first time authors, the direction might be to jump straight into e-publishing, thereby bypassing the need to incur cost in printing.

You have recently pursued an MFA in Dramatic Writing at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Asia  - what made you decide to enrol and what did you get out of the course as a writer of children’s books?

That’s right - at NYU Tisch, the first campus outside New York, here in Singapore!  Now a second campus has been set up in Shanghai.  I was a stay-at-home mum, writing picture books; I felt untrained.  None of my publishers knew anything about children’s book publishing.  We were all new to the game. I figured out that Harry Potter and Twilight were successfully adapted from books, and there were alumni from Tisch who had worked on both films.  I reasoned that getting into Tisch might teach me something about writing for books and adapting them for film.  It was really that simple – hahaha!  The craft of writing, the idea behind story-telling, whether it’s for theatre, film, TV or a book, the fundamentals are all the same.  Having gone to Tisch, I think I’m better able to tease a story from bud to blossom.

The Diary of Amos Lee: Girls, Guts and Glory and both its sequels to date have become best-sellers in Singapore. They follow Amos through his last three years of primary school. Where did Amos Lee spring from?

My son. He’s 11 and very dramatic in ranting and lamenting about his lot in life. It’s really his voice I hear in my head.

Amos has a hilarious turn of phrase but the books also bring diverse issues such as bullying, babies, popularity, animal cruelty and using modern forms of communication to the fore, not to mention spiders, girls (yeuch!) and the kind of bathroom concerns that find themselves uppermost in young boys’ minds.  How do you strike the balance between being informative and entertaining?

Did you find the information or educational bit overbearing?  I don’t know, I guess I just found the right hook to balance the two – entertainment and education.  I was very pleased when I found a book on mating behaviours of spiders.  I found it very funny that a spider’s courtship ritual is so similar to a human’s!  Because my publisher warned me that I couldn’t use anatomically specific words, I had to look for alternatives, and I thought naming an arachnid's mating organs would not get me into trouble!

How much of your own family life is reflected in the Amos Lee Diaries?

I'd say 40%. The mum is me. I’m quite naggy according to my kids. The jokes are my husband’s, my kids’ etc.

In the second Diary, Girls Guts and Glory, Amos publishes a school newspaper about spider and human reproduction, and devotes much space to his new baby sister’s diapers and feeding.  In the About the Author at the end, you say that you hope the book “will help parents to break the ice and talk to their children about sex” and that “children will be a little like Amos and find the hunger to do well in their studies and sports.” What has the response to the Diaries from adults been like?

I've received two complaint letters. That's a small number in light of the sales figure: to date, we have sold close to 70,000 copies (3 titles combined) since April 2009.

And can you share with us any particular feedback from children?

I think the two parents are overly hung up. Most kids I’ve spoken to don’t even talk about the sex bit. It’s mild by their standards! Most kids like the humor. The best responses were from boys who told me they were afraid to read, but my books, being local, made them confident. And because they were so easy to read, they overcame their fear of reading. That makes it really worthwhile in pursuing this ‘job’, writing for kids.

What do your own children think about having an author mom - and how do you think you compare with Amos Lee’s author mom?  Would you ferret out and read their diaries?!

If they leave them lying around. These days they are very smart, they buy diaries with a lock and key!!! I don’t correct their English, but when I read their homework or written exercises, I will correct their spelling.

It’s great that Amos’ sister, whom he refers to as WPI (“Whiny, Pesky and Irritating”), now has a book of her own, Whoopie Lee, Almost Famous.  Was there a bit of pressure from young fans to give Whoopie her own space?  How did you find it, giving Whoopie a separate voice from Amos?

It’s my daughter’s voice! Very sweet, and whiny at the same time. Because she has to rub us in a certain way to get what she wants. But I find that very cute. The book came about because it was ‘faster’ to write than an Amos book. Whoopie took me two weeks, plus a third week polishing the draft with the editor. Amos can take between two to four months to write, depending on the research needed.

Among your picture books is your series of magical stories based on Peranakan culture.  You have already spoken of your connection with the Peranakan culture in a recent interview with Gathering Books, and you talk about how your mother brought your grandmother’s stories alive for you.  What compelled you to write these stories down for other children to enjoy, and did you find yourself doing background research?

My dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2008. Shortly after that, I decided to write about his Peranakan heritage which was essentially his culture. At that time, he could still help me. Now, he’s still functional, but his memory lapses are becoming more frequent and painful. Yes, I was learning so much about my Dad's culture. And reading the stories and anecdotes from people in the past, I found they reminded me of my life as a child growing up in my grandparents' household.

Many of your books provide insight into a specific cultural context, without the point ever being labored.  How do you strike the balance between telling a good story and opening children’s eyes to different cultural practices?

I don’t know how to answer this one.  The four books that make up my 'Monsters In The Mind' series were an experiment.  I wrote them in response to the artists I picked.  Christine Lim has a fascination for Chinese fashion history: textiles, clothes, shoes etc.  She's totally besotted with opera artistes; her mother used to be a performing opera artiste.  So I wrote Guai Wu knowing she could capture the flavor of the culture.  Nu Nu: the Ring-Necked Monster  is about a girl from the Padaung tribe in Burma and Lee Kowling had visited them when she was young. Because we spoke before I wrote the stories, I was able to decide their settings.  As you know, most authors do not get to meet or talk to the artists in America, but in Singapore, we do things more consultatively, and the community of authors and illustrators is small.

Guai Wu is based on the Grimm fairytale The Elves and the Shoemaker, with the added dimension that rather than elves, it is about a little boy who is bullied and outcast because of his pointed ears.  How did you come write it?

I chanced upon Jim LaMarche's The Elves & The Shoemaker in the library.  His illustrations were astounding.  Looking at them, I thought of Christine immediately.  I decided that we’d make it Asian, and because we were talking about shoes being made, I thought exploring the culture of lotus shoes and hinting at the feet binding culture would give it a unique twist.

What differences can you see in the kinds of books available to children in Singapore today, compared with when you were a child?

We had no picture books produced in Singapore then!  And most titles were imported. Very few people were writing in the 70s.  Only in the mid 80s did we have many authors bursting on the scene, but not writing children’s books, mostly adult fiction.  There was one author, Jessie Wee; she wrote a series of books called Mooty the Mouse.  That was it.

You have had a particularly busy year– what are you looking forward to focusing on now?

Yes, I have completed my MFA course and Whoopie Lee: Almost Famous, my 17th book, was launched in May. Now I’m working on adapting Amos into a TV programme – quite an amazing project, seeing that I’ve just graduated from Tisch!  I get to conceptualise the TV direction with the Executive Producer, and we’re also getting animators from Tisch involved.  It’s going to be a mix of live action plus animation.

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