It was a day chock full of amazing presentations and meeting wonderful people. Today promises to be another exciting day and starts soon so for today’s blog post I will just upload some images from yesterday.  Once I return home from Singapore I promise to expand on some of the panel discussions I attended.

The Venue: The Arts House is Singapore’s first court house and former parliament house which is now and an arts and heritage venue.

Keynote speaker Stephen Mooser (USA) delivers the keynote speech “What is the Future of Children’s Publishing”?

Author and literacy advocate Christopher Cheng (Australia) “It Takes Two (or More) to Tango: Collaborating with an Illustrator, Musician, or Animator

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Today is the day! The Asian Festival of Children’s Content starts in a few hours with the Keynote Speech “What is the Future of Children’s Publishing” by Stephen Mooser (USA). After that the day is jam-packed with events to choose from. I will be attending sessions by Christopher Cheng (Australia), illustrator YangSook Choi (Korea), author Holly Thompson (Japan/USA), Pooja Makhijani (Singapore/USA) and John McKenzie (New Zealand).

Last night’s pre-festival panel discussion that I hosted with Tarie Sabido (Asia in the Heart, World on the Mind) and Dr. Myra Garces-Bacsal (Gathering Books) was a success. Over 40 people attended and took part in our discussion Building a Nation of Readers via Web 2.0: An Introduction to Kidlitosphere and the YA Blogosphere . Thanks to all those who attended and a special thanks to Tarie and Myra who were such lovely ladies to work with!

For the past few weeks I’ve been hearing children everywhere asking each other the inevitable question: “What are you going to be for Halloween?” Their answers are as varied as the children themselves, and show much creativity and imagination. My daughter’s best friend, for instance, will be an atomic fireball candy.

Every time I hear the question, though, I think of Yangsook Choi’s picture book, Behind the Mask.

Kimin, a young Korean American boy, decides to dress as his grandfather for Halloween after looking through some old boxes of family memorabilia and remembering how grandpa’s masks used to scare him when he was younger. His friends think that dressing “as an old man” is not very scary, but what they don’t know is that Kimin’s grandfather recently passed away, and that he used to be a Korean mask dancer.

This is a lovely intergenerational story that mixes aspects of Korean culture with American Halloween customs. Children will be excited by the illustrations of a masked Kimin dancing on the streets with his friends, and to find out the secret that the old mask holds.

In this 2009 interview, the author tells us what inspired her to write Behind the Mask— and how leaving home [Korea], helped her find her way home.

“In a province of a country ruled by a merciless and powerful emperor, there lived a man called Basket Weaver.”

So begins Basket Weaver and Catches Many Mice by Janet Gill, illustrated by Yangsook Choi (Knopf, 1999), a charming fable about a skilled basket-weaver, who would take especial care when weaving beds for newborn babies, using exactly the right materials to suit their name – like owl feathers for wisdom or Pink Everlasting flowers for a long life. One day he rescues a drowning cat, who decides to stay with him, something that pleases him for: “In his country, cats received much honor. Everyone knew that cats followed their own minds and always made wise choices”. He names her Catches Many Mice, “for he believed everyone should have a name to live up to.”

They live and work happily together until the day Delivers Messages arrives with a message from the Emperor ordering him to take part in a contest with three other basket weavers to make a bed for his new daughter. The winner will live in the palace and be granted three requests… the losers will be sent to work in the mines for seven years. Basket Weaver spends the next five days making his finest ever basket – but he discovers at the least minute that he only has one brightly-colored feather from the birds who have already flown away for the winter. His cradle is not perfect and he arrives at the palace in some trepidation – all the more so because Catches Many Mice has disappeared – apparently one of her “wise choices” – or is it…?

I won’t spoil the story – all I will say is that it ends more than satisfactorily, after a suitable surprise and three requests being grudgingly granted. This is a story that stays with you quite a long time after hearing it. Talking afterwards about the requests, which were much more difficult for the emperor to grant than the wish for gold and jewels he expected, both Older Brother and Younger Brother recognised that there was no way round it: the winner could not have asked for anything else and have remained true to himself. They found it quite a sobering and heart-warming thought.

They enjoyed Yangsook Choi’s illustrations too – Basket Weaver’s gentle character shines through; the emperor is suitably imposing, as is everything to do with him; there are interesting details in the basket-weaving; it’s a very bedraggled cat that is pulled out of the eddying water; and there is unobtrusive humor wherever Catches Many Mice is shown after that. All in all, a lovely readaloud, perfect for a bedtime story.

You can read an interview with Yangsook Choi in our current issue of PaperTigers – and she also features in our Gallery.

Moving house can be an unsettling, not to say traumatic experience for children – especially when the move involves a move to a new country with a different culture and language. Usually children have had no say in family decisions and they can feel swept along by the adults in their lives. Stories about other children moving to a new home are certainly a good way to help ease feelings of isolation and, as in so many other situations, provide an opening for children to talk about their own worries. Even children who appear to be positive and excited about imminent changes in their lives need an outlet to express niggling concerns before these whisperings become overpowering spectres.

Goodbye, 382 Shin Dang Dong (National Geographic, 2002) by sisters Frances and Ginger Park and illustrated by Yangsook Choi (who all feature in interviews in our current focus on Korea) is a perfect story to reassure and reflect on: and its ending on a note of optimism means that it’s also a good story to go to sleep on.

Jangmi is very sad that her family is about to move from Korea to America. She has to say good-bye to everything and everyone she knows – the market, her best friend Kisuni, the beloved willow tree in her garden. Jangmi’s parents have done a good job preparing her – she knows a lot about what will be the same, similar, different: but even so, she doesn’t want to go. However, once actually in America, Jangmi starts to feel a bit more optimistic. There is a beautiful maple tree in her new garden and she makes a new friend – and she realises that, despite the distance, Kisuni is still her best friend.

However, this is not only a story for children who have immigrated into a new country: it is also a story that will comfort children left behind by friends moving away. And it reminds all children (and adults) of the importance of making new neighbours feel welcome, wherever they have come from.

For more book recommendations for children and young adults, read New to America – Living the Immigrant Life from The Miss Rumphius Effect; and Ann Lazim’s Personal View for PaperTigers: The Immigrant and Second Generation Experience in British Children’s Books.

In her recent interview with PaperTigers, Deborah Ellis talked about the background to her most recent book, Off to War: Voices of Soldiers’ Children. This is a very thought-provoking book for children aged 9+ about the effects on the children left behind of having parents fighting overseas. In a way, these are children whose day-to-day existence is not outwardly affected by conflict and yet on whose lives the consequences of war can and often do have a profound effect.

A book I have read again recently to my children is Milly Lee’s Nim and the War Effort, illustrated by Yangsook Choi (Sunburst/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). Set in San Francisco during the Second World War, it tells the story of Nim, a little girl who is intent on beating her arch enemy, Garland Stephenson, an unprincipled bully, from winning the school drive to collect old newspapers “for the war effort”. She strikes lucky when she is offered a garage piled high with bundles of newspapers and resourcefully calls the police to help her to get them to the school in time…

Nim’s rather strict upbringing is ostensibly unaffected by the fact that the Second World War is going on – but it pervades her life nevertheless. Her grandfather wears a lapel pin of crossed American and Chinese flags; and she is fully aware of what certain symbols around her mean – like a gold star on a white background in a front window, to show that “the family who lived there had lost someone in the war”. At the same time, their deeper significance is perhaps lost on her. She is too young to understand that the lapel pin is there to protect her family from the prejudice against Americans of Japanese ethnicity at that time; nor what the emotional impact of losing a loved one in a war overseas actually means. However, (more…)