Today’s post comes to you from Yue (Cathy) Wang China's Missing Genre: The Struggle for YA Literature In today’s Chinese children’s book market, the YA category is relatively underdeveloped. Back in the 1980s, Chen Danyan 陈丹燕 wrote the novella Death of a Schoolgirl 女中学生之死, based on a real event that happened in Shanghai in the 1980s—the suicide of … Continue reading #IntYALitMonth: Chinese YA Literature
Today’s post comes to you from Eleanor Duggan Across Memory, Identity, and Speculative Futures I’ve always resonated with Dr. Bishop’s (1990) statement of books as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors that allow readers to see themselves, view into the experiences of others, and to foster empathy and deeper understanding through character’s words and actions. For … Continue reading #IntYALitMonth: Taiwan YA Literature
Written by Melissa Cooper A flurry of kindergarteners zoom past on tricycles, sticks clenched between their teeth, fully in character as Nezuko, the demon from the wildly popular manga Demon Slayer. This series took Japan by storm, captivating everyone from toddlers to teens. Despite its violent story - beginning with the brutal slaughter of the … Continue reading #INTYALITMONTH: Manga, Manhwa, and Manhua
Zhuang Musicians in Longzhou. Source: Wikipedia Those of us from Western Europe and the Americas use a script that is so widely used we barely recognize it as a script. In fact, we often refer to it as “the” alphabet, as though there were only one. For us, our script is writing itself; most of … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: The Songbook Scripts
"Thank you all" written in the Nüshu syllabary. Photo and carving by the author. Over the past decade, my research for the Endangered Alphabets project has found scripts that are exclusively sacred or spiritual, others used only for magic and divination, some employed solely for accounting and bookkeeping, some even for notating songs. Writing, then, … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: The Saddest Scripts
The Making of Pets by Yi-Fu Tuan The question of pets is a controversial one. Many societies across the world claim to love animals, particularly dogs and cats. However, if you look a little closer you will find that is not really based in reality. The way in which we breed animals in the pet … Continue reading #Veganuary: Dominance & Affection
By Peter J. Li After spending over 13 years living and working in China, I became both aware of the Animal Rights issues that plague the country but also the many individuals working to change the current system. I was introduced to Animal Rights through Chinese philosophical thinking and traditions, and therefore am always surprised … Continue reading #Veganuary: Animal Welfare in China
Night Bus, by Zuo Ma, translated from Chinese by Orion Martin. Early in my reading of Night Bus, something strange happened: I began to feel nostalgic for the Chinese countryside of the 1980’s and 90’s. Not that I’ve ever been to China; Zuo Ma’s ability to evoke a sense of place with his incredibly detailed … Continue reading #IntlYALitMonth: Night Bus
In a Nutshell: Half a Lifelong Romance is set in the 1930s, the only clue of when the book is set, is a reference towards the end of the book, to the Battle of Shanghai, which started in August 1937: “the battle of Shanghai began in mid-august and the fighting was intense for three months.” … Continue reading Day 15: 🇨🇳 Half a Lifelong Romance
READ There were so many books I could have chosen for China, and making a decision about which one to read was difficult. In the end, I picked Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, translated by Ina Rilke, because I loved the book’s cover and its title. The narrator is a seventeen-year-old boy, whose … Continue reading The Booktrekker: China
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 