Continuing our Authors Remember Their Grandparents series, today we welcome author and illustrator Yuyi Morales to PaperTigers with a poignant piece about her Grandpa Felix.

Yuyi’s most recent book is Ladder to the Moon, written by Maya Soetoro-Ng (Candlewick Press/Walker Books, 2011). It is the story of a little girl Suhaila whose wish that she could know her grandmother is granted one night, when a golden ladder appears with Grandma Annie, ready to take her up to the moon. Read more about the book on Yuyi’s website, and take a look at the first few pages here - gorgeous!

This is not the first time Yuyi has depicted a grandmother by any means – there is her rosy-cheeked Abuelita with hair “the color of salt” in the exuberant My Abuelita written by Tony Johnston, our current Book of the Month on the main PaperTigers website (Harcourt Children’s Books, 2009). And there are her own picture books starring Señor Calavera – Just a Minute: A Trickster Tale and Counting Book (Chronicle Books, 2003) and Just in Case: A Trickster Tale and Alphabet Book (Roaring Brook Press, 2008): we are big fans of both of them in our household and love Señor Calavera’s website.

Visit Yuyi’s PaperTigers Gallery, enjoy her wonderful interview/gasp at the images over at 7-Imp’s, and find out about all her books and her many projects on her website and blog.

Grandpa Felix

My white dress of crochet clusters like popcorn, mama made especially for me.
She also made the wings and a halo with antennas, and painted with powder my cheeks, and when I saw myself in the mirror I was a butterfly.
At school I fluttered like I was supposed to do, I ran in a circle and flapped my arms with my wings behind. But nobody looked at me.
Everybody was too busy watching the pretty white girl flap her transparent arms and shake her chamomile washed hair.
Even mama, her swollen eyes straight at me, was looking somewhere else.
Nobody cares to watch the brown that is me.
Just like nobody wants to play with a girl with baby shoes that fit the insole inside and hold my leg right so that some day I can have straight feet.
“Mama, those shoes with the golden buckle and the bow on top are so lovely,” I have been telling her every time we pass by the glass case of the shoe store.
But mama doesn’t say much anymore.
She must be tired of repeating what I already know. That I have to stick with these ugly baby shoes until… when? Until I am a grown up.
Clipity, clap, clipity, clap, went my shoes while we left school.
Pling, plong, pling, plong, went my mama’s eye tears while we walked down the street. To Grandpa Felix’s house.
He is my abuelo because mama told me so. But he doesn’t remember me.
I know it because the other day when our teacher took us to the park, and my grandpa was sitting in a chair outside his door with a red and green blanket around him, and I waved at him thinking, “Now, look, everybody, there is my grandpa waving back to me,” and all the other kids waved too because they didn’t know he was my grandpa Felix – only mine, grandpa kept waving and smiling to all the children, just the same as to me.
He doesn’t remember me, I know.
Mama told me once, that sometimes he doesn’t remember her either, even though she is his child. “How could he?” she explained, “He’s too old to be one hundred and four and remember about so many things.”
Then, that morning, while I was a butterfly, Grandpa Felix stopped remembering no more. In her eyes, my mother’s tears going pling, plong, pling, plong.

Yuyi Morales

In Part 1 of her Guest Post for our current theme of Children and their Grandparents, author Swapna Dutta described the importance to Bengali children of the tales collected by Dakshinaranjan Mitra-Mazumdar. Here in Part 2, Swapna retells one of those stories for us. It comes from perhaps the most famous of Mitra-Mazumdar’s books, Thakurmar Jhuli (Paternal Grandma’s Bag of Stories):

Saat Bhai Champa / Seven Champak Brothers

LONG, long ago there lived a king who had seven queens but no children. So he was delighted when he came to know that the seventh queen was going to have a baby.

The queen had octuplets: seven little boys and a little girl. But the other six queens were terribly jealous. They stole the babies while the seventh queen was still unconscious and buried them in the ash-heap. Then they told her that she had given birth to crabs and showed her some. The queen was too heartbroken to protest and thought that someone had cursed her with such a terrible fate. The news reached the king. “The seventh queen must be a witch.” He said, “Throw her out of the kingdom!”

Something strange happened soon after. The birds stopped singing. The flowers stopped blooming. And what was worst, there were no flowers to worship the deity in the royal temple. Everyone scoured the kingdom for flowers. Finally someone discovered seven champaks and a camellia blooming on the ash-heap. “Get them!” said the king, “And I’ll reward you.”

But it proved to be an impossible task. As soon as anyone tried to pick them they shot up higher, out of reach, and sang in a sweet chorus:

“You can’t touch us –
Oh no, oh no!
Let the first queen come.
To her, we’ll go!”

The king sent for the first queen. She turned pale and remembered what she had done at the ash-heap. The flowers shot up higher and asked for the second queen. The second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth queens all came and went. None of them could touch the flowers. The flowers now asked for the king. But he could not get them either. The flowers shot up even higher and sang,

“You can’t touch us–
Oh no, oh no!
Let the seventh queen come.
And to HER, we’ll go!”

“Find the seventh queen!” ordered the king. “Find her at any cost!”

The king’s men scattered far and wide, searching for the queen and found her in the forest, lonely and miserable. They took her back to the palace and to the ash-heap. As soon as the flowers saw her, the seven champaks and the camellia tumbled down from the tree top, crying, “Mother! Mother!” as they fell into her arms.

But they were flowers no longer. The seven champaks had turned into seven handsome princes and the camellia into a beautiful princess. The king soon heard the story and punished the six guilty queens by banishing them from the kingdom. Suddenly the entire garden was full of flowers again. And the birds started singing. And every one lived happily ever after.

Retold by Swapna Dutta

You will also find a longer retelling of Seven Champaks to read/listen to in Begali with an English translation alongside, at Galpo Boli Shono, a fun website for children to immerse themselves in Bengali stories, puzzles and songs. We’re grateful to Galpo Boli Shono for their permission to reproduce some of their gorgeous illustrations by Tarit Bhattacharjee here, to accompany Swapna’s retelling of the story.

For our current focus on children and their grandparents, we have invited authors and illustrators who have written children’s books that center on that special relationship to share with us some of their own personal memories of their grandparents. Over the next few weeks we will be posting these pieces here on the blog – and I can promise you, we’re all in for a real treat.

Our first piece comes from author Andrea Cheng, who says, “Many of my books have to do with the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren (Grandfather Counts, Goldfish and Chrysanthemums, Shanghai Messenger, Only One Year, The Key Collection). Most of these stories in some way reflect the relationship I had with my grandparents, particularly with my paternal grandmother.”

One of my favorites of Andrea’s books is Where the Steps Were, her novel in verse about a class of inner-city 3rd graders, which also references grandparents. Do watch Andrea’s short but inspiring video documentary, which shares what “a group of 3rd graders can do with just one book.” Andrea’s latest book is the newly released Where Do You Stay? (Boyd’s Mill Press). Read our 2008 interview with Andrea here, and visit her website here.

Memories of My Grandparents

My family immigrated to the US from Hungary in installments. My immediate family came first, and then my grandparents, and later my aunt, uncle, and cousin. When I was very small, we all lived together. Later my grandparents got their own apartment just behind our house. I loved going to visit them and was allowed to walk there by myself. Grandma spoiled me with my favorite palacsintas (walnut and sugar filled crepes) She let me eat them before dinner and never seemed worried that I would spoil my appetite.

Sometimes I was allowed to spend the night with my grandparents. My grandmother fixed me a special bed on the floor that I called a nest, and we played there for at least an hour before bed. She sang me Hungarian nursery rhymes, which I still know, and let me play with her plastic pop together beads. She taught me to sew clothes for my dolls. My grandfather told me stories until finally I fell asleep.

When I was about eight, my grandparents moved from Cincinnati to Chicago to join my aunt. I was heartbroken. The feelings described in The Key Collection come from this early separation.

My husband’s parents immigrated to the US from China in 1949. Unfortunately he was never able to meet any of his grandparents. Luckily my grandmother, who lived until age 95, very happily took on the role of being my husband’s adopted grandmother. Grandma knew very little about her ancestry, but she looked Asian (perhaps Mongolian since the Mongols came through Hungary centuries ago) so many people assumed she was my husband’s grandmother, not mine!

Andrea Cheng

Thank you, Andrea.

I am including this post in this week’s Poetry Friday, which is hosted by Reading Tub’s Family bookshelf – I’ll add the link later as I’m having some difficulties conecting right now…

We are delighted to welcome writer Swapna Dutta back to PaperTigers with this article about the stories collected by Dakshinaranjan Mitra-Mazumdar (1877-1957) and thanks to him, still known and loved by Bengali children today. I personally have to thank Swapna for introducing me to the work of Sukumar Ray, and I think I’ll now be seeking out some of Mitra-Mazumdar’s tales. Swapna is also a regular contributor to BoliKids .

When I was a child the concept of stories and story-telling was inseparable from my two grandmothers; and it was so for most children of my generation. Those were the days of joint families where the mothers were always busy with household chores or outside work and fathers, too busy in their own world. But Grandma/grandpa/grandparents always had time for us. They were the ones to pet and pamper; listen to our troubles; provide us with pickles and sweets; and most important of all, tell us stories. Our grandparents had a formidable stock of tales that included folktales and fairy tales; stories from mythology and epics; and stories that formed part of common rituals – an integral part of our life. Children who lived in metro cities had access to the radio. But for the rest of us, hearing stories from grandparents was our chief source of entertainment when it was too dark to play outside; during the long rainy afternoons and the shivery winter evenings.

Most of those stories had come down through generations as part of oral tradition. As a result, there were several variations of the same stories. Not that it hampered our pleasure in any way! It was fun to come across two different endings or have the prince/princess face different situations, adventures and dilemmas. One of the pioneers to note down these tales and bring out a printed collection was Dakshinaranjan Mitra-Mazumdar. He patiently collected stories from village women, travelling from village to village as he did so, his main aim (more…)

Indian writer Ramendra Kumar‘s latest children’s books focus on stories of Indian children in a contemporary setting – an area of writing for middle-grade readers and young adults that has been greatly ignored in India: indeed, he would suggest, actively avoided. Though that may be changing: his most recent book, Now or Never (Ponytale Books 2010) has just been selected as a supplementary reader for Classes 7 and 8 by the Central Board of Secondary Education in India. Other novels include Terror in Fun City (Navneet Publications, 2008) and Not a Mere Game (Navneet Publications, 2006), and his book J J Act is endorsed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and Butterflies, a non-profit “programme with street and working children”. Ramendra is also the editor of BoloKids.com, a “complete portal for the young and the young at heart”. We are delighted to welcome Ramendra to the PaperTigers blog.

During the Asian Conference of Story Telling in New Delhi a few years ago, a key-note speaker with very impressive credentials in the field of Library Science (and an equally impressive personality) was giving tips to children’s writers on how to write for children.

“All writers attempting to write for children should keep in mind that they have to go down to the level of children,” she concluded with a flourish, waiting for the applause which naturally followed.

During the interaction session I raised my hand to ask a question. She transferred her imperious gaze to me and lifted her eyebrows.

“Ma’am, I think you got the direction wrong. We children’s writers don’t have to go down to the level of children, rather we have to rise up to the level of the young and vibrant minds. For, ma’am, children are the closest that you can get to God, and God lives up there, not down below.” There was a stunned silence for some time and suddenly the entire Hall No. 5 of the India Habitat Centre exploded with claps and cheers.

As an MBA in marketing the primary lesson I was taught was to respect the customer. For us writers the customer is the child. However, instead of respecting the child, we patronize her and take her for granted. The books being churned out by writers and publishers in India are a testimony to this fact. Most of the books written for children are rehashes of earlier classics. As far as the publishers are concerned, they consider the fairytale/folk tale/fantasy segment safe.

I would like to put forth a strong case for a different genre of writing; and I would like to take the liberty of naming this segment of writing the Here and Now genre.

What do I mean by Here and Now writing? (more…)

Award winning Australian children’s author Chris Cheng is a passionate literacy advocate and besides writing full-time and being Co-Regional Advisor for SCBWI Australia/New Zealand, he has an extensive schedule of  speaking engagements at schools and literacy festivals. Chris recently returned from the Philippines and shares with us his experiences at the First Manila International Literary Festival:

Last month the National Book Development Board of the Philippines held the First Manila International Literary Festival and I was thrilled to be the only Australian (and one of five international speakers, including Vikas Swarup author of the book Q&A on which the movie Slumdog Millionaire was based) at the festival. The three day festival was titled LOL, Lit Out Loud. There were also many Filipino speakers that included some wonderful poets, columnists and authors.

The Filipinos have a glorious love of poetry and throughout the festival there were breakout panels expressing and discussing the love of poetry – there were also wonderful recitations of poetry on the opening day (many in the Filipino language so even though I couldn’t understand what was being said listing to the sounds being spoken for me was a joy) which begs me to request that we should have more opportunities at festivals and events and in our daily lives for ‘hearing’ poetry being recited.

I was engaged to speak on children’s literature in Australia and abroad, to talk about the changing children’s market and also to talk about my own writing experience and the writing of identity. As I have written a number of very popular children’s titles on the Chinese diaspora; New Gold Mountain, the Melting Pot, and Seams of Gold,  this was right up my alley. Talking about identity was extremely powerful for in the Philippines many of the available titles are imported. A very, very small publishing industry exists – they are establishing an identity but it is small.

There were session on graphic novels, travel writing, experimental literature, story telling workshops, gender writing – even a cooking demonstration with book launch – and the food by Mita Kapur (the books is the F Word – we discussed that title and how it would work in Australia!!!)

I was also thrilled to be able to send a short time on Saturday morning talking to the staff at the all girls school – the Immaculate Conception Academy at Greenhills in Manila. My one hour talk on writing and teaching became a two hour talk when they asked for demonstration of how teachers can use everyday objects all around them to be the stimulus for writing! We ‘wrote’ (talked actually) great stories on wall fans and baby elephants!

It was just a delight to the first Australian to speak this festival. As a well-established Australian children’s author I feel it is vital for the established nations with a rich literary heritage to support developing nations who desire one. In Australia we love reading our stories – stories that cast a light on life in the bush, in the suburbs and in the city; stories that feature our native wildlife and our own human characters with their particular follies and foibles; that describe our bushfires or floods, or simply our way of life. Readers in other national also deserve to be able to read their stories as well.

More information about the festival can be found here on my blog.

Australian author Susanne Gervay (visit her website and blog) has had a very busy year this year and social justice has been high on her agenda. She is one of the contributors to Fear Factor: Terror Incognito, an anthology of short stories featuring ten Australian and ten Indian writers, edited by Meenakshi Bharat and Sharon Rundle (Macmillan Australia/ Picador India, 2010). She has been writing about her travels to India and Kiribati, a “Pacific atoll nation drowning under climate change”. She has just launched Always Jack, the third book about Jack, following on from her wonderful I Am Jack and Super Jack. Most recently, Susanne was in South Korea for the Nambook-010 Fesival, the 5th Nami Island International Children’s Book Festival. She was there because she was taking part in Peace Story, a very special project. We are very grateful to Susanne for telling us all about it here. For those of us who couldn’t be there in person, Susanne’s description and photographs are definitely the next best thing!

In these troubled times with North Korea’s military attack on South Korea, the international publication of Peace Story is poignant and important. Twenty-two children’s authors and twenty-two illustrators from twenty-two countries engaged in an international cooperative to create a unique anthology, Peace Story, for young people. Respected academic author on Irish children’s literature Valerie Coghlan and Irish Laureate for children’s literature Siobhán Parkinson were the co-editors of Peace Story.

‘Peace Story’ was part of the Nami Island International Children’s Book Festival, South Korea which was first held in 2005 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hans Christian Andersen. It is a six-week bi-annual festival of children’s books, the environment and peace, featuring outstanding exhibitions of children’s books and illustrations from all over the world. Much loved Korean illustrator Kang Woo-hyon, President of the Nambook-010 International Committee headed the ‘Peace Story’ project with the support of the Nami Island Minn family who published and translated some of the stories, and hosted the authors and illustrators on Nami Island. It was supported by National YMCA Korea, UNICEF and UNESCO Korea, the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism, and Nami Island the official sponsor of the IBBY Hans Christian Anderson Awards.

My Australian story ‘To East Timor with Love Australia’, illustrated by the award-winning Frané Lessac, opens the anthology Peace Story. Frané Lessac’s vibrant colours of bright pink bougainvillea and yellow-centred frangipanis create a visual representation of loss of homeland through war, but also hope for the future. (more…)

We are delighted to welcome Karon Alderman to the PaperTigers blog: Karon received a Special Mention in this year’s Frances Lincoln Children’s Book Award for her title Story Thief, about asylum seekers in Newcastle upon Tyne, in the Ouseburn Valley, which is also the location of the Award’s co-founder and principle administrator, the wonderful Seven Stories.

Story Thief is about an 11-year-old failed asylum seeker called Arlie. She narrates her story of the days following the arrest and detention of her family as she tries to hide from the authorities. She is supported by her friend Louise and two boys who have their own reasons for staying in hiding. At the announcements of this year’s award, Mary Briggs, one of this year’s judges and the co-founder of Seven Stories, hinted at the twists in the plot that give Story Thief its name. She also described it as “not a happy story” and “distinctly depressing”, and perhaps the lack of hope is what would make this more suitable for older readers than the middle-reader audience the award is aimed at. However, apart from its local setting being close to Seven Stories’ heart, it was felt that it needed a special mention because it explores the horrors of asylum seekers’ situations and presents the reality of the sense of helplessness when dealing with the beaurocratic system.

Here, Karon tells us about her passion for the issues she highlights and why she wrote the story.

Story Thief is about Arlie, an eleven-year-old failed asylum seeker. When her mother and sister are taken in the night, to a detention centre, she is on a sleepover with her friend next door. She tries to run away, helped by her friend, Louise.

I was thrilled that Story Thief was a runner up in the Diverse Voices competition, especially as I’d written it very quickly. However, the ideas had been simmering for some time as I support Common Ground, the East Area Asylum Seekers Support Group, a voluntary organisation that gives friendship and practical help to asylum seekers.

The asylum seekers I’ve met – the woman who’d lost her nine-year-old daughter, the girl who’d been trafficked, the stateless woman – are real people, in desperate situations, yet living in hope. But at the same time, I saw endless press coverage about asylum seekers committing crimes or receiving generous benefits. Actually, asylum seekers in Britain get a £35-a-week card. If their application to be official refugees is rejected, they can be left destitute. They are not allowed to work. They can be moved with little notice, detained, deported.

The story grew from two incidents: (more…)

Welcome to the Second Part of our Guest Post from photographer and journalist Caroline Irby, whose interview with PaperTigers is also featured in our current issue. If you missed Part One, then head on over there straight away to take a look at her stunning photographs of some of the children from her recent book A Child from Everywhere (Black Dog Publishing (UK), in association with Oxfam, 2010) – and without further ado, here are the rest of the photographs that Caroline has kindly shared with us, along with some of the background to each one.

I’ve taken photographs for the NGO WaterAid a few times in Africa, and their head of photography in London offered to help with this project, knowing that some of their UK-based employees are from overseas. Alexander’s father, Anthony, came forward.

The Community of Malian Refugees introduced me to Oumou’s family, now living in London.

BBC World Service were a brilliant resource: their journalists come from all over the world and I spoke with people working on every different language desk there. A woman on the ‘French for Africa’ desk gave me Boubacar’s contact details.

Daniel’s father was working for a refugee organisation in Scotland, and they put me in touch with him.

I met a Cuban on the London underground; he knew no Cuban children in the UK but did have a Peruvian contact, whom I called and who invited me to a party for Peruvians near Waterloo. There were no Peruvian children at the party born in Peru, but I was given contact details there for a boy called Luis…

I joined an online chatroom for people from St Vincent and the Grenadines living overseas; Andree-Ann’s much older sister responded to my message that I was looking for a young St Vincentian in London, and suggested her younger sister…

I met Emmanuel through an organisation called Refugee Action, which provides support to refugees who have arrived in the UK direct from refugee camps, as part of the UK government’s Gateway Protection Programme.

Bola was the last child I interviewed for this project. After trying all the more obvious routes (the Swazi embassy, South Africans living in the UK, online chatrooms etc), I contacted an independent newspaper in Swaziland, hoping I might find a journalist there who’d studied in the UK and had connections in this country. There I found a man called Welcome, who gave me the number of a Swazi lady living in London.

Oxford University put me in touch with Fiona’s family: her mother is a postgraduate student here.

I met Emilia at her school, in a very multicultural area of Leeds.

The Scottish Refugee Council gave me Fernanda’s details; she was one of the first children I met with.

Thank you again, Caroline, and many congratulations on the arrival of your own baby son in August.

The exhibition of A Child from Everywhere has now closed in London but will be opening in Japan later this month: at Okazaki World Children’s Art Museum from 18th September to 28th November 2010, then at Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo, from 21st December 2010 – 23rd January 2011.

It is a real privilege to welcome photographer and journalist Caroline Irby to the PaperTigers Blog to share some of the photographs from her recently published book A Child from Everywhere (Black Dog Publishing (UK), in association with Oxfam, 2010), in which she has brought together children from 185 countries now living in the UK. In itself it is quite an achievement, but what makes this project so very special is how Caroline has captured the children in her beautiful photographs, and how they then speak to us in their own words.

You can read an interview with Caroline in our current issue of PaperTigers, in which she talks about the project. Here, she gives us an idea of how widely she had to throw her net to track down children from so many countries. Enjoy these stunning photographs – and we’ll be bringing you more in a second post next month.

I called the Andorran Embassy in London and the Ambassador’s wife agreed to help… Andorra is a tiny country with few nationals living in the UK; it took a few months to find an Andorran child here.

An organisation called Education Leeds gave me the details of a few schools in multicultural areas. One of these yielded Akeilah.

I wanted to reflect the extent of the diaspora of the recent wave of immigration; I’d also never been to the Orkneys and was curious to see so I contacted the Orkney Isles Education Authority and they found me Juan.

The Dominica Embassy in London helped me to track down Alissa.

University postgraduate departments are home to many foreign students; Cardiff University put me in touch with this family from Egypt.

I got talking to someone at a Christmas party about this project; her daughter was at school with Elsabet…

The British army recruits soldiers from Fiji, amongst other countries. I knew of an army barrack in Tidworth village, Hampshire, and contacted the local school, who let me interview a couple of children.

A friend of mine living in Oxford has a daughter who goes to school with Aura…

I noticed a sign reading, ‘Ivoirien Computing and Community Centre’ outside a portacabin on an estate near my home. The man working at reception connected me with Inza’s family.

Cambridge Racial Equality and Diversity Service introduced me to a few recently-arrived children who they give English language support to. Moeko was one of them.

I contacted the Pacific Islands Society and they invited me to a party for Pacific Islanders in London. I met Isabella’s family there.

As Corinne wrote a couple of weeks ago, there is an exhibition of A Child from Everywhere now on in London – or do get hold of the book for yourself: not only for the actual photographs, but also to read the insightful, thought-provoking and sometimes funny observations the children make about their new and old homes. I can’t recommend it highly enough! Thank you, Caroline.