A trip to the Guadalajara Book Fair, the largest Spanish-speaking festival in the world; plus, meditations on the children’s book industry
Also an event (today!) at Taiwan Literature Base, and book club on Taiwan Travelogue
Hello all!
If you’re in Taipei today (Sunday, 12/15), I’ll be in conversation with Hilda Hoy from 15:00-17:00 at Taiwan Literature Base. We’ll be talking about language and writing; all are welcome!
Last week I was in Guadalajara, promoting Taiwanese children’s and comic books at Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara (FIL), the biggest book fair in Latin America. I was exhilarated by the soulful atmosphere: from artists to volunteers, from professional editors to teenage manga fans, people were kind, generous, curious, and warm.
Among the people I met were a teacher who got funding from the Mexican government to spend two years reading to children in a hospital; a book and art fair director from León, Mexico, who spends Saturdays making art with children in rural areas (part of a larger city project, Mi Barrio Habla); an American expatriate who founded a school for indigenous students in Guatemala; and dozens of adorable high school and college students, eager to learn something new.
Together we reflected on the connections between Mexico and Taiwan. The unexpected resonances left us amazed: how language imposition by colonial regimes has shaped an appreciation for multilingual environments; a desire to center indigenous peoples in the narrative of national history; a belief in unseen spirits, ghosts, and the living presence of the dead; experiences of multi-generational living and coexistence; an acute awareness of the struggles of rural areas, where many of us still have family.
You may be wondering: what exactly was I doing at a book fair in Mexico?
I recently tried to explain my new job to a buddy in Paris. I work for a publisher that received a government bid to promote Taiwanese children’s and comic books, I told him. Our task is to incentivize foreign publishers, from Europe to Southeast Asia to Latin America, to buy the rights to these books and translate them. Though I work for one publisher, I represent all publishers; my salary comes from the Ministry of Culture. What I took to be complex was to his mind simple.
“Ah!” my friend replied. “So you work for the Taiwanese government?”
I don’t know why, but we both started laughing. Maybe because it’s a banal arc for a prison abolitionist, or maybe I’m too unfiltered and absent-minded to represent the government. Certainly nobody should ask me to safeguard an important document or state secret. Fortunately, there are no nuclear codes involved in my work. It feels, instead, very humble.
And yet I believe to the core of my being that these books are vital. When South Korea’s president declared martial law last week, my mind flew to beloved friends from Indigo, a nonprofit in Busan working to bring books to youth (and an indie bookstore). “Are you OK? I texted.” “Just shameful,” one of them replied. Then I remembered two lovely people I met at the Seoul Book Fair, founders of Seomdre. Before I even got this job, they’d translated the Taiwanese children’s book Once Upon a Time, a Train Came to the Island into Korean. A parable of martial law, it begins with a grandfather telling his grandchild about the train that took away people’s kids, loved ones, and anyone who didn’t obey—including the grandchild’s dad. “Over time,” he says, “people came to believe that, as long as they lived by the rules, the Great Train would make our little island better.”
Though I love this book, it’s a tough sell, especially to American publishers who want happy stories about multi-hued animals getting along. But these Koreans loved it. “Our history, your history,” they said. “Very same.” (We spoke slowly in English and put our hands on our hearts.) Without even reading the last pages, we already knew what they said: “Now we can speak and sing freely. But if we let our guard down, the Great Train might return one day.”
Then the Korean couple handed me a white origami dove that matched the one in the book—because, they said, they knew the story was “very sad.”
(Note: the English translations of the Mandarin Chinese text were done by Kirsten Han.)
Over my week in Guadalajara, I met so many women after my own heart—almost all older than me, with decades of experience in children’s publishing in Latin America. Mónica Bergna, founder of Alboroto, an indie publisher in Mexico City, told me the story behind a book called Mexique: in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, 456 children of Spanish anti-fascist republican fighters were put on a boat, the Mexique, that traveled from Bordeaux to Mexico. (Mexico and the Soviet Union were the only countries in the world to grant these children asylum.) The children were only supposed to stay in Mexico for a few months, but the war continued and many never saw their parents again.
Though the book is years old and Mónica has probably told this story hundreds of times, she nearly wiped away a tear telling me about it. I tried to picture putting my five-year-daughter on a boat to cross the ocean, knowing I might never see her again—unsure whether she’d survive or drown, whether anyone would feed and shelter her if she did land in one piece. I couldn’t follow through with the mental exercise; something in my mind stopped working. Which is, I think, why we need books like this—to coax our minds into imagining what others have gone through.
After our meeting, I went to find the book at Monica’s stall; she was glad I wanted to bring it home and read it to my daughter.
Peggy Espinosa, originally from Guadalajara, told me she left her hometown when she was younger, finding it too conservative. However, an earthquake in Mexico City in 1985 profoundly impacted her (another Taiwan–Mexico City connection, as both places sit on fault lines). This led her back to Guadalajara, where she founded Petra Ediciones. At her stall she showed me an array of books, including one about how to draw flowers and plants, another exploring states of being from melancholy to curiosity to love, and a delightful book titled Italo Calvino in Mexico. “There are many children in Mexico who may never have the opportunity to visit modern art museums, but books can serve as their museums. These books provide pieces they can create themselves,” Peggy said in an interview. “Something remarkable happens—the collective unconscious opens up, and you begin to understand the world in a new way.”
I visited the stall of Argentinian publisher Limonero and fell instantly in love with a book called Una Vida de un Lapiz (The Life of a Pencil). It begins with a tree in Canada, still just a stump. Soon it ends up in the hands of a prisoner, who uses it to draw up plans for escape. Then the son of a prison guard “makes homework” with it, as the Argentinian put it (I love English made fresh). When he does math problems with a girl he likes, they have their first kiss. Then the pencil keeps traveling…
Another marvelous woman founded the indie publisher Calibroscopio in Argentina. Judith Wilhelm showed me a book called Huelo, about a figure who has a hole inside him. He’s inconsolable and keeps trying to fill it with different things—a cat, a bird, a hat, a fish, a chair, a book… but nothing works. In the end, he remains unfilled. He holds a balloon, saying, “I wouldn’t be who I am without this hole inside me.” The celebrated illustrator Yael Frankel wrote this book in memory of Judith’s sister, who passed away of cancer.
Another of Calibroscopio’s books, Criatura, is an inventive, oddly joyful book about perspectives, as well as the coexistence of monsters and children. Every picture is a bit of a riddle, with text that could be interpreted from the perspective of a child or from that of a monster. I bought two copies, but maybe should have bought five. My daughter loves it, and my elderly parents delighted my ten-year-old nephew, who lives in Madrid, by showing him pages of the book on a video call.
“Me encantan sus libros,” I said to one indie publisher. I love your books. She paused and smiled. She could see I meant it. “Sometimes, you know—you do wonder, what’s another book? There are so many books in the world. What’s another book?”
What is another book? It’s a question I’ve thought about all my life. Teaching in prison, I knew with deep certainty that books save lives. Outside of prison, though, I’m never quite as sure. Perhaps, I’m realizing now, this is one selfish reason I spend time teaching in prison; to believe that something I love is not frivolous, not unnecessary, not beloved merely to those who can afford to buy or display or gab professionally about them. But the books I’m describing protest against ignorance, against the things that distort us and make us ugly. These creators, like their books, feel to me like flames that refuse to be extinguished.
And I was happy when the publishers I met already knew books from Taiwan. I beamed whenever they said—and they all said it, with heart—that Taiwan makes beautiful books, just beautiful books. It’s hard to narrow down the titles they love, so I’ll just share the work of two Taiwanese authors, Bei Lynn and Liu Hsu-Kong, who visited FIL and did workshops with children and artists and children-artists.
Americans read little in translation, publishing among the fewest translated books in the world. In children’s publishing, the numbers are even lower than in adult fiction; there are no exact numbers, but it’s estimated to be less than 1 percent. This is shameful. To give you an idea of just how little this is, an estimated 150 children’s books were translated last year. If you think about how big the world is—195 countries—that means American publishers purchase less than one book per country. According to a thoughtful Asian American editor who’s bought books from Taiwan, a big reason may have to do with prizes; the Caldecott Medal, the most prestigious honor for picture books in the U.S., can’t be awarded to non-American authors. As a result, publishers are reluctant to purchase books that aren’t eligible. (Can’t someone make a new prize? Or organize to change the rules of this one?) Meanwhile, American primary and secondary education is American-centric, American culture is exported worldwide, and Americans are famously largely monolingual. So how will children in America learn about other places? Only the privileged can learn through travel; the rest will need books.
If you’ve noticed that I keep talking about women rather than people, it’s not an accident: with the exception of several men, every editor, agent, or publisher I met was a woman.
That the children’s book industry is dominated by women first struck me this April, when I visited the Bologna Book Fair, the world’s biggest fair for children’s books. Women editors, women agents, women publishers… there’s a bit more parity among writers and illustrators, but that’s all.
It shouldn’t surprise me that women are doing the labor of communicating with children. And yet. For the past two decades, I’ve kept ending up in spaces whose professionals or volunteers are majority women: schools (teachers, tutors, counselors, librarians); homeless shelters (providing food, dispensing soap); prisons (teachers, tutors); legal aid (food stamps, wage theft, housing conditions—this work is predominantly performed by women and, within the law, the least well-compensated); refugee welcome groups; detention centers for immigrants.
“What’s your ratio of men to women volunteers?” I asked a staffer at RAICES, an immigrants’ rights organization, one summer when Albert and I volunteered, helping families that had been separated apply for asylum.
“Ratio?” she repeated, laughing. “There’s no ratio; it’s all women.”
Publishing is not a refugee help center—money can be made, and children’s books make more than other genres—but certainly it’s less profitable than television and movies. Few enterprises conjure such an uneven response among the intelligentsia. What does it sound like to say you make books for children, especially little ones? Cute, whimsical, maybe even beatific (we’re inclined to thank a woman, but tell a man he’s special and bold); steeped in memories and associations (the lucky among us will instantly recollect our favorite books, days spent looking at pictures and daydreaming); philosophical (but not intellectually rigorous); moral (but impractical?), urgent (yet escapist?).
These muddled, contradictory impressions mix delight and nostalgia with unexplored misogyny and a refusal to take children seriously as people. Only dreamers will do it, the attitude seems to be; the rest of us carry on with the Earth, destroying or saving it, employing machines to think and work faster. (A children’s book writer might write about a machine that takes out one of its own screws and eats it while sitting under a tree; a chestnut falls on its head, whereupon he examines the nut and decides to use it as a substitute for the now digested screw.)
How to talk to or with children is the essential question of children’s book authors.
As a visually stupid person who goes to a museum and looks at the placards first—I love text—I’m really quite surprised to have landed in a line of work where I am immersed in picture books, comic books, and graphic novels. Had it not been for the intertwined life events of having my own child and moving to a new country, this turn toward thinking about visual literature wouldn’t have occurred. I’m astonished to realize my own prejudice, my lack of interest in children’s books. Was I being like a man?
Of course, part of it has to do with language. Here in Taiwan, I stumble and fail at communication every day. I’ve lost the hard-won confidence I used to have in speaking. I relate quite a bit to my five-year-old as she labors to put words together to make a sentence fit. Sounds are awkward in our mouths. And I see myself in her when she tries to insert herself into the conversation even when she doesn’t know exactly what’s being said; I understand instinctively that it takes courage and a certain refusal to be self-conscious.
Meanwhile, when I look at novels in Chinese, their vast amounts of text, I feel impotent, unmoored. I’ve lost the power I used to feel about my capacity to get close to the mystery of the text. It’s a relief to look at visual modes of language, picture books with few words.
Thus a loss of power in my life has allowed me to feel solidarity with a child. We both turn to pictures to piece together the story: anxiously for me, joyfully for her.
*
To state something obvious: just as there exist smart men who wouldn’t be caught dead saying they write for children, there are many smart men who do. Walter Benjamin wrote radio plays for kids, which became the basis for his monumental and unfinished Arcades Project. And of course there are male greats in children’s writing—C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Oscar Wilde, E. B. White. Lately, besides women writers like Astrid Lindgren and Edith Nesbit, I’ve been reading a lot of Gianni Rodari, a household name in Italy and the Soviet Union. Rodari, a teacher and writer, loved working with schools on pedagogical innovation.
I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Rodari. My current favorite is A Daydreamy Child Takes a Walk, a macabre tale of a child who loses his arm, then his leg, then his nose and ears. Along the way, various people in the village pick up the body parts and bring them to the child’s mother. When he comes home, hopping on one foot, with no ears or arms, but “cheerful as a sparrow,” his mother shakes her head, puts him back together, and gives him a kiss.
“Have I been a good boy, today?”
She replies, “Yes, Giovanni, you’re a most wonderful boy.”
And that’s how the story ends.
I’ve puzzled over this book. Cheating, I asked Albert, “What’s this story about?”
Love, he said simply. Acceptance.
Oh yes. A mother’s love for a child; more broadly, a human’s acceptance of a quality that is universal and incorrigible—“all children daydream,” she says to the various villagers who bring severed body parts to her door. When we read this book, what seems grotesque is not, perhaps because the child’s need to be repaired is universal. It’s our need, too.
I “test out” every children’s book on my daughter; this one made her cackle. She pointed at the most macabre illustration—a bucket of severed limbs—and said, “That’s funny.” Why? “It’s just funny.” But on the very last page, she said, “His mommy still loves him?”
Children, especially very young ones, are not as cowardly as we adults, because they have no sense of mortality and do not question the givenness of life. This perhaps allows them to look straight at something that adults find scary or “abnormal,” including precarity or disfigurement. And this is why E. B. White wrote, a writer must never condescend to children.
I’ve been thinking about that maxim—to never condescend—over the past year, as I’ve attended four of these book fairs. I’ve felt my tastes in children’s books evolving, growing stricter. I liked how one editor, Lulu, looked at our books—sometimes rapturously, always decisively. If she liked one, she’d stop suddenly, praise it, and say, “If we did this, we wouldn’t make this page so glossy, we would make it have… have… what’s the word?”
“Friction?” I offered.
“Fricción, yes!”
But if she didn’t like a book, she’d repeat, “No, no, no” in an expressive Argentinian accent, in a way that somehow felt not mean but rather wonderful, with instinct and determination.
More and more, the books I like best take seriously the special resources that children have, among them the lack of fear of mortality. I see how my favorite publishers cultivate values, with a sense of art and ambiguity.
Lest that all sound too pretty, there’s a delightful picture book by Taiwanese artist Lai Shin Hau in which a boy farts his way to the Taipei Zoo. The book has only one word: the onomatopoeia for flatulence. In Mandarin, the sound 噗 is simply pu!
Before the book fair, I had the task of coining an English translation of this word. You’d think it would be easy, but how exactly do you transcribe passing gas? Only after consulting two literary critic friends did I come up with PFFT! (Other possibilities were TOOT, POOT, FRAPP, and THPTHTP.)
The intimidating Argentine editor with emphatic taste immediately noticed this book’s colorful illustrations. She admired the style, then pointed to the Chinese character.
“What’s this mean?”
“It's onomatopoeia,” I said, faltering. “A sound for farting.”
“A what?”
“Fart.”
“What?”
“PFFT!”
“What?”
“You know—”
“Ah—I understand!” She threw her head back and laughed. “We also have books like this in Argentina. Disgusting books, they are very funny.”
Book Club: Taiwan Travelogue
We’re talking about Yang Shuangzi’s celebrated Taiwan Travelogue (tr. Lin King) for our next book club on Friday, January 24th at 7:00 PM EST / Saturday January 25th at 8:00 AM Taiwan time. If you’re in Taipei, you can get an English-language copy at Bookman Books. Reply here for a Zoom link!
Events (Today!)
Michelle will be in conversation with Hilda Hoy today, 12/15 from 15:00-17:00 at Taiwan Literature Base. They will be talking about language and translation. All are welcome, and no need to RSVP or anything like that!
I was glad to take part in an inspiring symposium on global public health, which explored everything from mercury pollution caused by gold mining in Indonesia to NGO funding in Vietnam to the impact of climate change in Asia. This was the brainchild of the visionary professor and global health advocate Chunhuei Chi (left, below). On the right is our former epidemiologist-VP Chen Chien-jen, who gave a keynote about how Taiwan became the world leader in healthcare—yet is still excluded from the World Health Organization.
Professor Chunhuei Chi and former VP Chen Chien-jen
The full list of Books from Taiwan. I work at Locus Publishing, which manages the children’s books and comic books; Grayhawk Agency expertly manages the literary fiction and nonfiction books.
Love this post- right up my alley! Now I need to see if I can get my hands on any of your favorite books. So much food for thought. I think you're right with American-centric primary and secondary curriculum playing a part, and the fact translated books can't win many awards. I also think it could be the general feeling of what style and feel is typical in American children's picture books. Yesterday a library coworker and I were laughing about how different this translated French Christmas book felt compared to American Christmas books. The book features an old woman who talks about being scared of thieves and her friends dying and then what happens when a family's car breaks down in front of her house on Christmas. The themes of the book, and the way they were expressed, were just so different from most American kids books that I can see the difference in taste- and possible worry publishers might have that they wouldn't sell- being another part of the equation? Have you read Jon Klassen's The Skull or David Sedaris' Pretty Ugly? I was surprised by those books in a way that now makes me think they might not be as surprising in other cultures/ languages. Last thing- just putting in this link to Betsy Bird's list of children's books translated to English in America in case anyone wants to see https://afuse8production.slj.com/2024/12/13/31-days-31-lists-2024-translated-childrens-books/
Thanks for sharing your Mexican book trip with us! For me, it was a great reminder about just how much wonderful literature, while perhaps aimed at a younger audience, still carries messages and values that should also resonate with older readers. It also provides a convenient excuse for me to have one more section to visit when I find myself in my local bookstore.
Happy to have received yesterday my copy of Taiwan Travelogue. I just want to be sure I'm on the list to receive the zoom link for the bookclub meeting on Jan 24.
Happy 2025! Trying to remain hopeful.....