Feng Zikai Manhua: Original Chinese Cartoons

Cartoons offer a child's eye view of China
BETWEEN THE LINES Annie Ho (familypost@scmp.com) May 27, 2012
Feng Zikai was China's pioneer in children's cartoons. He taught art and music in Shanghai in the first half of the 20th century and was also known for his essay collections on art and music, as well as his translations of Russian and Japanese texts into Chinese. Feng was a keen observer of nature and children, and this was reflected in his art, with many of his paintings created in the style of childhood reminiscences. The style of his cartoon drawings, known as Zikai manhua, were influenced by the changing social and political climate in China between the two world wars, his Buddhist beliefs and his years living in Japan. While Feng had many admirers, he knew others could not accept his style, and once made this comment about them: "Some people take one look at my paintings and cry out in alarm: 'But this person has no eyes or nose, only a mouth!' or, 'The four fingers on this person's hand are all stuck together!' ... Such remarks aren't worth responding to, so I ignore them." (From Geremie Randall Barme's biography An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai [1898-1975]) I first came across Feng's name when I bought a complete set of 2009 winners and runners-up of his namesake award-winning books. The Feng Zikai Chinese Children's Picture Book Award was established in 2008 to encourage the creation of original Chinese-language children's picture books by recognising the best writers and illustrators of such books. Since then, I have joined the board of the Feng Zikai Award and witnessed first-hand the diligence and devotion with which the organisation has promoted its good cause. It's a delight to discover and read aloud Chinese picture books that aren't merely translations of English-language books. Original Chinese-language children's books are important to learn about contemporary Chinese family life, and perhaps to observe the Chinese sense of humour. Among the Feng Zikai Award books is one that comes with a leaflet with English translation as well as a CD with readings in Putonghua and English. Ander Y.'s Me and My Bike is a poignant story about a boy who wishes for a new bicycle. His mother promises it to him if he gets good grades. Told in the first person, the little boy admits that he is not a very good student, but he studies very hard for the sake of his promised new bicycle. When he gets a top grade on his test, he can barely contain himself and runs home to show his mother. However, through his mother's tone and excuses, he realises the family cannot afford a new bicycle. In the end, the little boy "chooses" to buy crayons as the reward for his good grade. His old bicycle gets a new coat of paint and he rides off with a wide grin. This story is a wonderful example of the style of myriad Chinese children's book authors who depict the hardships of modern life through a child's eyes. I hope publishers will translate more books into English to share with a wider audience of readers. The Hong Kong Museum of Art's new show, Imperishable Affection: The Art of Feng Zikai, features more than 200 of his paintings.    RTHK will be airing a one-hour programme Compassion for All - The Cartoons of Feng Zikai at 7.30pm, Saturday, June 9 Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong (bringmeabook.org.hk) a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy

Maurice Sendak tribute Brundibar Bumble-Ardy

Heartfelt tribute to a wild imagination
BETWEEN THE LINES Annie Ho May 20, 2012
A number of my friends cite Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are as their favourite book as a child. First published in 1963, it went on to sell more than 19 million copies. The first time I read it, I didn't like it. I didn't understand why Max, the main character in the book, would choose lawlessness over the safe confines of home. My reaction to this story reveals more about my own character than the quality of the Sendak's evocative prose and well-crafted illustrations. I grew up as a rule-loving conformist. It's no surprise that I also couldn't relate to the angst-ridden Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Why can't children like Max and Holden just co-operate and make life easier for themselves and their parents, I would wonder. Then one day last summer, while browsing at a bookstore in Taipei for the third consecutive day, I came across Sendak's Outside Over There. I was drawn to it because I am a book lover and appreciate that Sendak is a leading author of children's books. I also took a quick glance and saw that it was a story about a young girl and her baby sister, which would be perfect to read aloud to my elder daughter. I hastily bought the book and went about the rest of the day in Taipei. That night, back at the hotel, my daughter was too tired for a bedtime story and fell fast asleep. I stayed up and began to read Outside Over There. My eyes widened and my jaws dropped as I read this unsettling story about a little girl who was instructed by her father to take care of her little sister. And for the brief moment she took her eyes off her baby sister, the baby was kidnapped by goblins and forced into a wedding as a goblin's bride. I finished the story, paused to take a deep breath, and went on to read it two more times. Thus began my recent love affair with Sendak. Next came In the Night Kitchen, in which three bakers, all in the likeness of rotund Oliver Hardy of the Laurel and Hardy comedy duo, make Mickey cake by mixing a batter containing a little nude boy named Mickey. The laughing faces of the bakers are at once jolly and eerily ominous. Mommy? is the most elaborate and surreal pop-up book I've ever encountered, with magnificent paper engineering. Containing just six pop-up scenes, it follows a little baby through a house of horrors fraught with life-threatening danger as he searches for his mother. The only pop-up book by Sendak, it is reminds me of Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. It confounds me that visionaries like Sendak and Burton create in a genre for children, and yet the content of their stories is unsuitable for children. What madness. The only Sendak book I've read aloud to my daughter is Brundibar, which also happens to be my best-loved of his storybooks. Based on a Czech opera that was performed dozens of times by children at a Nazi concentration camp, this picture book is cleverly illustrated by Sendak, and retold with side-splitting humour by Tony Kushner. The best TV mini-series I've ever seen is Kushner's Angels in America, adapted from his brilliant play and starring Al Pacino and Meryl Streep. I am in awe that a Pulitzer prize-winning playwright such as Kushner would collaborate on a children's picture book. This demonstrates Sendak's appeal. A couple of weeks ago, I spent the evening reading through my entire collection of Sendak's books, ranging from Very Far Away, first published in 1957, to last year's Bumble-Ardy, the first book in 30 years for which he was both author and illustrator. The next day I learned that he had passed away, a coincidence as disquieting and exhilarating as Sendak's oeuvre. With admiration, then, I dedicate this column to Maurice Sendak, who died on May 8 at the age of 83. Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong (bringmeabook.org.hk) a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy

Parenting Guides: Robert J. MacKenzie's Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child: Eliminating Conflict by Establishing CLEAR, Firm and Respectful Boundaries; Elizabeth Pantley's 1996 best-seller Kid Co-operation: How to Stop Yelling, Nagging & Pleading and Get Kids to Co-operate; as well as her 2007 book, The No-Cry Discipline Solution: Gentle Ways to Encourage Good Behaviour Without Whining, Tantrums & Tears

Try these guides before reading the riot act
BETWEEN THE LINES Annie Ho (familypost@scmp.com) May 13, 2012
For Mother's Day, I had originally planned to share some of my favourite mummy-baby storybooks, such as Deborah Guarino's Is Your Mama a Llama? and Amy Hest's Kiss Good Night. Then my mind wandered to last Mother's Day. Around that time, my elder daughter turned from a sweet, easy-going toddler into a difficult malcontent. According to my husband, the problem was our temperamental child. According to me, the problem was our differing views on how to deal with and raise our child. If a stranger were ever to give unsolicited parenting advice, such as "You need to control your kids" or "You shouldn't scold your child like that", I would feel quite confident that they were wrong because they knew neither me nor my child. However, when my husband said to me, "Our daughter is out of control and you're spoiling her", I got defensive and exasperated. Not only had he misunderstood me, he had also completely misunderstood our perfect angel of a child. Joking aside, his statements forced me to contemplate the possibility that the man who knew me inside out could actually be making a more accurate assessment of the situation than myself. My low point came during Mother's Day lunch last year. In the middle of yet another discussion about our differing views of our elder daughter's temperament, my mother tried to interject with her own comments. I inadvertently snapped at her and made her cry. Yes, I made my mother cry on Mother's Day. That's when I knew that I needed help. So I invested in some parenting guides. The subtitles of these books sounded even more promising than their titles: Robert J. MacKenzie's Setting Limits with Your Strong-Willed Child: Eliminating Conflict by Establishing CLEAR, Firm and Respectful Boundaries; Elizabeth Pantley's 1996 best-seller Kid Co-operation: How to Stop Yelling, Nagging & Pleading and Get Kids to Co-operate; as well as her 2007 book, The No-Cry Discipline Solution: Gentle Ways to Encourage Good Behaviour Without Whining, Tantrums & Tears. It was not lost on me that, from the titles I had decided to purchase, I was implicitly agreeing with my husband's stance that we had a strong-willed child who whined too much, and that I had been doing a lot of ineffective nagging and pleading. Setting Limits is a useful guide for parents who like their advice served straight up. It explains that strong-willed children like to test limits more than compliant children. The best tip I learned from this book is that, while parents can get away with giving unclear instructions to compliant children, strong-willed children need specific words and actions to understand how to behave. For example, if you see a messy room and say, "Oh, I wish you wouldn't leave toys lying everywhere like this", a compliant child will know to interpret this as a cue to tidy up the toys. On the other hand, a strong-willed child will need more concrete words such as, "You need to put away these toys before we leave the house to go to the park to play". In short, parents need to be very conscious of their words and actions when dealing with a strong-willed child. The two guidebooks by Elizabeth Pantley devote more pages to explaining what it's like to be a child: little beings who are not biologically nor psychologically capable of controlling their emotions. I like Pantley's proposition that discipline is not a simple matter of correcting a child's immediate behaviour, but rather is a continual process of training a child for a lifetime of self-discipline. I also appreciate that her starting point is not assessing the type of child or type of discipline issue. Instead, she asks the reader to complete a "What is your parenting style?" quiz. By focusing on what kind of parent you are rather than what kind of child you have, you can be more aware of yourself when putting Pantley's parenting advice into action. My mother is not in town for us to celebrate Mother's Day together this year; but that's OK. I'm still atoning for the stunt I pulled last year and have been trying to make her feel that every one of the last 365 days has been a Mother's Day. Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong bringmeabook.org.hk a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy through reading aloud to them and providing easy access to the best children's books for underserved communities across Hong Kong

A Wrinkle in Time; When You Reach Me; Where the Wild Things Are

Fond memories linger despite wrinkles in time
BETWEEN THE LINES Annie Ho (familypost@scmp.com) May 06, 2012
In my quest to introduce the best quality storybooks to my children, I've rediscovered some favourite book titles from my childhood. Now I have amassed a humble collection of books I read and loved years ago. My parents didn't read aloud to me and I didn't become fluent in English until after we emigrated to Canada when I was seven, so I never read those early classics like The Very Hungry Caterpillar or The Cat in the Hat. As a result, my favourite books are stories that my daughters will probably not start to enjoy until they are in primary school. One of my first purchases was A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, science fiction for junior readers at its best. Re-reading it brought me back to those wonderful upper primary years in Mrs Taylor's class. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I would gather with a half-dozen other students to attend a special class that used an interdisciplinary approach to teaching. This class was very likely modelled on the International Baccalaureate programme, which didn't exist in Canada until I was in high school. We worked on one class project per term and were taught maths, history, science and anthropology in that context. One of those projects was "Build a city of the future", in which we spent months creating architectural models, writing descriptions of the city we each envisioned (form of government, city planning, transport, family home life) and discussing our choices. In my future city, the residents teleported. I must have been reading A Wrinkle in Time and taken the idea from the book. From there on, I went through a phase of reading science fiction and fantasy; one that sticks in my memory is a story by Ray Bradbury about a child who has moved to Venus and is locked in a closet by classmates on the one day every seven years when it stops raining and the sun comes out. I didn't read science fiction as an adult until I re-read A Wrinkle in Time. Then I learned about the new book by Rebecca Stead in the young fiction category that had just come out. What prompted me to immediately obtain a copy of When You Reach Me was a book review describing it as a story that "pays homage to A Wrinkle in Time". When You Reach Me is about Miranda, an 11-year-old girl living in New York City. Two incidents happen to her at the beginning of the story: her best friend is punched by a random kid on the way home from school, and she receives a cryptic message about her lost spare key. These two incidents end up being intertwined, and Stead spins a yarn inspired by A Wrinkle in Time. In fact, A Wrinkle in Time is Miranda's favourite book, and she carries it with her wherever she goes. It is of no surprise that When You Reach Me won many awards, including the 2010 Newbery Award. A wonderful story inspired by another book is Dave Eggers' The Wild Things, loosely based on Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. In this case, quot;inspired" means taking a 30-page children's picture book and fleshing it out into a 300-page adventure for Max, the main character, that includes divorced parents, an older teenage sister and many new characters on the island where the beasts live. One of the hardest things to do when you write for junior readers is use the right language to communicate a young adult's point of view. While Stead does a better job than Eggers in finding that exasperated tone of innocent but all-knowing youth, their complex, multilayered stories will appeal to children and grown-ups alike, especially those of us who remember what it was like being on the cusp of adolescence. Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong bringmeabook.org.hk a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy

Mem Fox on Phonics

Sunday April 29 2012



Young readers must learn to walk before they can skip

Annie Ho familypost@scmp.com 

Ask North American parents of preschoolers about phonics, and chances are they may not know what you're talking about. 

Ask Hong Kong parents of preschoolers about phonics, and chances are they will be able to give you a first-hand comparison of the methodologies used by phonics learning centres in town.

When Mem Fox, a retired Australian professor of early childhood literacy and best-selling author of children's books, visited Hong Kong last month, she gave a talk on parent-child reading to an enthusiastic group of mothers. 

When Fox learned about the heavy use of phonics in Hong Kong preschools, she crossed out half of her prepared notes and instead devoted part of her talk to phonics. 

Countries with the highest rates of early childhood literacy, such as Australia and Canada, do not follow a programme of phonics. From my own childhood in Canada, I have strong memories of 'readers', those little booklets with simple sentences that were used to teach children to read: 'This is Spot. See Spot run.' 

Phonics exercises such as 'cat, bat, sat, pat' were taught as part of our writing programme in the second grade. While Fox stressed the importance of phonics, she made the interesting distinction that it should be used to teach children to write, not to read. 

In her view, when a five-year-old child is struggling to learn to read (because he has not been read to by his parents and carers, she said), making that child sound out the words phonetically will not make him learn to read faster. In fact, it will likely further turn him off reading when he starts to associate it with struggle and not fun. 

Fox's analogy is that reading a book is like driving a car. We don't learn to drive a car by memorising the how-to manual or learning vehicle construction. However, if we already know how to drive a car, or have spent time as a passenger in a car, we are able to learn better about driving and car construction.

My own analogy is singing a song. A child who has never been sung to will not understand the notes of the musical scale as quickly as one who has grown up around songs and music. And a child who can already sing on his own can figure out Do-Re-Mi even more readily. 

That's how it goes for children learning to read. Phonics doesn't mean much to the child who has not been read to. When a child is read his favourite book over and over, he will recognise whole words. And a child who reads will be able to pick up the theory of phonics more quickly than one who does not read.

The danger of teaching phonics too early, that is, before the children can read, is that it may reduce their enjoyment of books and reading. 

Learning phonics does play a role in a child's English language development, as long as parents and educators acknowledge that the order of learning should be reading first, then phonics and writing.
Just as babies learn to walk first before running and skipping. 


Annie Ho is a board governor of Bring Me A Book Hong Kong (bringmeabook.org.hk), a non-profit organisation devoted to improving children's literacy