Top books capture children's hearts ( 2003-10-28 08:44) (China Daily)
The Soong Ching Ling Foundation has revealed its sixth Soong Ching Ling
Children's Literature Awards.
"Ni Shi Wode
Mei(You Are My Baby Sister)," by Peng Xuejun and several other literary
works win prizes in the Sixth Soong Ching Ling Children's Literature
Awards. [File Photo]
The award, which has been
bestowed once every two or three years since 1986, is an effort to enhance the
public's awareness of excellent children's literature by Chinese authors. It is
one of two major awards for children's literature in China. The other is the
National Excellent Children's Literature Award given by the Writers' Association
of China.
A total of 19 books have won this year's awards, including three top-prize
winners and 16 Good Book Award winners.
The announcement was made on October 19, about two years after the foundation
honoured the best children's literature published between January 1, 1999, and
December 31, 2001.
Nonetheless, several award-winning works feature the writers' reflections of
the lives of teens, providing food for thought, whether the protagonists lived
some 30 years ago, now, or in the unforeseeable future.
The novel selections included five winners, including books written by
acclaimed children's literature writers Qin Wenjun and Cao Wenxuan. They
included the funny episodes of "the Big-Head Son and the Small-Head Dad" that
are widely watched among pre-school audiences after having been adapted into a
television cartoon series.
However, the only novel that ascended to a top prize is a book written by the
comparatively young and less well-known writer, Peng Xuejun, "Ni Shi Wode Mei
(You Are My Baby Sister)."
With the decision, the committee has surely made a discerning choice.
Intended readers of this book are middle school students, a crowd that prefers
action over sentiment. The marvelous thing about the book is that it quietly
develops a story that describes true love and sisterly affection, while never
boring its readers. In fact, though it never demands attention by using
suspense, fantasy or comedy, it is a book that a teenager will finish in one
sitting and then muse over for a long time.
The narrator and heroine of the book is a 9-year-old girl who moves from a
city to the deep-mountain country along the western border of Hunan Province
when her mother is dispatched there to work among peasants in the early 1970s.
The narrator doesn't conceal that the girl is just an ordinary child -
blemishes and all - most dramatically revealed in her relationship with her
6-year-old sister "Laobian" (the Old Flathead).
"We always decided which one of us should wash the dishes by finger-guessing
game," she says in a matter-of-fact tone at one point, adding that "we would
divide whatever snacks we could get into two equivalent halves. Afterwards, I
hastened to finish my share, I would ask her to let me have a bite of hers. She
always consented. Then I would devour a large part of her remaining food."
In a neighbouring peasant family there are poignant scenes told of
poverty-stricken parents' of five daughters. The gentle, self-effacing big
sister in that family is like a magnet, producing an inexplicable appeal for the
heroine that draws her into the family's life.
While this peasant family desperately wants a son, the mother gives birth to
yet another daughter. The infant girl is dearly called "mei," or "baby sister."
Her little pink, fragile existence, just like the peach tree standing by their
house that gives forth to unprecedented splendid blossoms that year, arouses
tender and affectionate emotions from the hearts of the girls, and cleanses them
from childish selfishness.
Peng Xuejun is both an adept stylist and a good story-teller. Her prose is at
once unaffected and classically beautiful, and the plot is developed fluently
and unobtrusively. Just as the award committee's recommendation says, "she
creates her novel like a faintly hued watercolour landscape, sometimes like a
sweet and sad folk song."
Compared with the deep-mountain rusticity of 30 years ago told in Peng's
novel, Qin Wenjun's "Tiantangjie Sanhao (No 3, Tiantang Street)" presents a
reality much more familiar to today's urban middle-school students. It is a
reality, however, perhaps too realistic to be desirable.
The book was granted the Good Book Award this time.
The protagonist of the book is a Shanghai first-year middle-school student
burdened by the confusions of growing up. In school he has some classmates who
call each other by ugly nicknames. A sophomore torturer systematically bullies
him and his friends, and a girl he lovingly admires has the look of Snow White
but the sophistication and malice of a Queen.
Outside school he is alienated by an adult world that is full of quirks,
conflicts, and sometimes direct hostility.
There are certainly truths in Qin's account about the living reality of
today's urban middle-school students. But her indifferent tone leaves readers
feeling that she has allowed her young heroes to experience and know the unjust
ways of the world and to taste the unhappiness of life at too early an age.
Qin is the editor-in-chief of Chinese Children's Literature, and the author
of many prize-winning books.
Another Good Book Award winner, "Gen Niao," written by Cao Wenxuan, starts
with a girl collecting flowers on a cliff. She slips by accident and falls down
into the valley below. The girl appeared in the dream of the boy called Gen
Niao, who, after waking up, decides to start a journey to seek his dream.
Cao is a professor of Chinese literature at Peking University, and a two-time
top prize winner of Soong Ching Ling Children's Literature Award, who is famous
for the aesthetic inclination of his works. "Gen Niao" carries his style to a
further point, and the book is written in carefully weighed rhetoric, and is
full of metaphors and symbolic implications.
Science fiction constitutes an important category in the award programme, but
in the past five sessions not a single work of this genre has won a top prize.
The reason is simple: There had not been a qualified work, according to Lu Shan,
secretary general of the organizing committee.
Yet this time a science fiction book has broken through as one of this year's
three top prize winners. With 50,000 copies in print, "Feifa Zhihui (Unlawful
Wisdom)," written by Zhang Zhilu, already is the best seller among all the
finalists.
The story unfolds according to what a shy and reticent heroine sees and hears
after she gets enrolled in the best middle school in her city.
From the first day on, Sang Wei finds her campus milieu somewhat hostile. As
time goes by, strange things keep happening to students around her.
Some schoolmates start to behave in strange ways, totally unlike themselves.
Lu Yu, the kind big-brother who is the foremost reason she was able to get into
the school, changes not only his name, but his whole personality and becomes a
high-IQ villain. Behind the scenes of these perplexities is a high-tech crime
that combines the boldest experiments in bio-science and information technology.
The book is full of thrilling twists. For example, there is a campus clock
that forever stays at the midnight hour and is said to be "waiting for the
coming of somebody," and one or two students dream weird things they find come
true the next day.
In all these works about Chinese teenagers, wherever the heroes and heroines
live and whatever they encounter, they cannot escape the pain they must go
through to know about people and society before they reach
adulthood.