Last week I was lucky enough to spend some time in San Francisco where one of the highlights of the trip was a day spent sightseeing with PaperTigers’ managing editor and producer Aline Pereira. Our first stop was the outstanding Asian Art Museum, one of the largest museums in the Western world devoted exclusively to Asian Art. We wandered though the three floors of amazing exhibits and got to watch master Japanese bamboo artist Tanaka Kyokusho demonstrate his bamboo art. Tanaka mixes traditional bamboo techniques with a contemporary sensibility to create a unique style of his own. His bamboo baskets are amazing works of art. While the adults watched Tanaka’s demonstration, kids got to try weaving a pattern with various materials such as paper and raffia.

Our next stop was the San Francisco library to see an exhibit of artwork by author/illustrator Elisa Kleven. Elisa, currently featured in our PaperTigers’ illustrator gallery, is appropriately described by Aline as being a master of imaginary worlds. Her artwork is simply stunning with bright colors and so much detail that the illustrations feel as if they are moving and jumping off the pages at you.

Aline (l) and myself (r).

–

Click to enlarge the photos and you can see the original illustrator manuscript for Abuela plus a puzzle!
—–

–

I purchased a copy of The City by the Bay: A Magical Journey Around San Francisco (written by Tricia Brown, illustrated by Elisa) to bring home to my children. Here’s my daughter Emma reading it to our dog Riley and a close up of her favorite page – fireworks and the Golden Gate Bridge. Emma took this book to school for Show and Tell where it was quite the hit! The kids loved the illustrations and the challenge of finding the dog, cat and baby on each page. Check out our PaperTigers’ gallery to see more of Elisa’s work.
—- —-

Multicultural adoptions have become so prevalent that an entire genre has emerged, for kids and parents alike. “One of the most frequent requests we have,” says Nicole Harvey of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, “is by adoptive parents of Asian kids looking for ways to orient their children to their birth culture.” She likes especially the complex and popular Cooper’s Lesson by Sun Ying Shin.

On our own PaperTigers, the genre is explored in a review of Three Names of Me and an interview with Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery award winner and an adoptive parent herself. Franki at A Year of Reading, also an adoptive parent, reviews Caroline Marsden’s When Heaven Fell. Scroll down for her interview with Rose Kent, author of Kimchi and Calamari, additionally reviewed and interviewed at PaperTigers. Cynthia Leitich Smith‘s blog Cynsations has a great list of books on multicultural adoption.

You don’t have to be an adoptee or adoptive parent to appreciate these books, of course. As our world becomes smaller and families more diverse, we all need inspiration and information from this vital field of children’s literature.

For all families, spiritual books are an important way to transmit values to children. In multicultural families, the need is particularly complex. On our own PaperTigers site, you’ll find reviews of All the Way to Lhasa, Shiva’s Fire, Sky Sweeper, and even Ruth Nason’s series of books, prepared for the U.K.’s Religious Education school program, on visiting spiritual centers of various faiths. You can also search PaperTigers for books with spiritual content.

Out on the web, the Quakers’ website offers an annotated list of books emphasizing love, forgiveness and hope across cultures and religious traditions. Penguin Books publishes a list of mostly Christian and Jewish titles, plus one book on the Ramayana. Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has written several books for children emphasizing kindness and other spiritual values; he’s published by Parallax Press. Nicole Harvey of the Asian Art Museum, where many multicultural San Franciscans turn for materials, recommends several widely available titles: Kindness: A Treasury of Buddhist Wisdom for Children and Parents, Ayat Jamilah: Beautiful Signs: A Treasury of Islamic Wisdom for Children and Parents, and Daughters Of The Desert: Stories Of Remarkable Women From Christian, Jewish, And Muslim Traditions.

That’s just a start! We’ll return to this important topic again with more resources and further perspectives.

The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco just opened a big retrospective on the work of Tezuka, father of anime and manga, words which refer respectively to the Tezuka-inspired animation film and graphic books now so fabulously popular. Opening day at the museum last weekend, the show was packed with twenty-somethings and parents tagging along with their 10-year-olds. Nicole Harvey (who buys children’s books for the musuem shop, among her many other duties) and her colleagues at the museum have been working overtime to get the adventurous show and related activities up and running. There’s a Manga Lounge set up with a typical manga-fan kid’s bedroom and lots of manga-related products. The bookshop has a great collection of manga and books about anime and manga, including Gilles Poitras’ deconstructions of the magic for those of us who are a little more dependent on the written word. Gene Yang, author of the highly regarded American Born Chinese, is among the area artists who will demonstrate their comic art skills at weekly events through the summer.

If you’re the parent of a comic-lover and live nearby or if you plan to visit the Bay Area this summer with kids, the Tezuka show is a chance for you to learn something and earn some undying gratitude from the children as well. And if you can’t be here in person, the show’s website has links to everything from a Tezuka bio to essays on manga. Check out the blog, too! Help yourself to a virtual visit to a magical world.