Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature

Claudia Nelson, Rebecca Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317065975
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together children's literature scholars from China and the United States, this collection provides an introduction to the scope and goals of a field characterized by active but also distinctive scholarship in two countries with very different rhetorical traditions. The volume's five sections highlight the differences between and overlapping concerns of Chinese and American scholars, as they examine children's literature with respect to cultural metaphors and motifs, historical movements, authorship, didacticism, important themes, and the current status of and future directions for literature and criticism. Wide-ranging and admirably ambitious in its encouragement of communication between scholars from two major nations, Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children's Literature serves as a model for examining how and why children's literature, more than many literary forms, circulates internationally.

SECTION IV
A History of Didactic Children’s Literature

Questions about what children’s literature should do and how it should do it are difficult to answer because they depend in part, as Cao Wenxuan points out in his chapter in this volume, upon adult opinions of children’s dispositions and views. While Cao maintains that writers should aim to communicate profound truths in their writing rather than cater only to children’s dispositions for play and fun, others such as Karín Lesnik-Oberstein have asked whether writers and critics can ever even know children’s dispositions because adult interaction with the child through text is often based on constructs rather than on any definitive reality.

The role of didacticism in children’s literature is a central subject for scholars of all nationalities; however, this collection’s introduction notes that it may be of particular interest to scholars of contemporary Chinese children’s literature, who continue to confront criticism that has historically elevated didactic agency over artistic innovation. In her book American Childhood, Anne Scott MacLeod identifies the period immediately following the Civil War as the moment when children’s literature in the United States “ceased trying to improve children and undertook instead to celebrate them” (75). Chinese children’s literature is presently going through a comparable moment, as chapters in this section by Tang Sulan and Chen Hui suggest. Their work illuminates the historical role of didacticism in children’s literature as well as the push within some contemporary children’s literature and criticism to alter that tradition. At the same time, while she considers the movement away from didacticism an advantage in artistic terms, MacLeod proposes that it brought in its wake losses as well, in that the minimizing of childish wrongdoing “signaled that moral seriousness was beginning to drain away from children’s literature and maybe from childhood, too.… [Antididactic writing] trivializes children in relation to their society,” she argues, adding pointedly, “Children’s literature came into being when adults began to take children seriously as moral beings” (76). Along similar lines in the present collection, Cao’s chapter and Mei Zihan’s chapter, which concludes the volume, continue to stress the need for didacticism, with Mei arguing that didactic literature must be given a longer trial period so that it may reach artistic and aesthetic maturity.

Moreover, even while American critics have, like MacLeod, tended to consider that didacticism is inimical to artistry, many American writers have continued to try to harness the presumed power of children’s literature to shape its readers in socially desirable ways. Claudia Nelson’s chapter on The Book of Knowledge emphasizes the historically popular belief that proper literature can craft ideal citizens, and the final two chapters of this section offer examples of applied didacticism in the U.S. context by focusing on texts that espouse cultural sensitivity to race history, the civil rights movement, and important historical figures for American children. In these chapters, Michelle Martin and Katharine Capshaw also attend to the form of the literature, with Martin exploring the evolution of the Black Aesthetic and Capshaw troubling the use of photographic picture books for misconceptions they may promote about the “truth.” In both American and Chinese children’s literature, then, questions of didacticism remain closely intermingled with those of artistic expression.

Works Cited

Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín. Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.

MacLeod, Anne Scott. American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994.

Chapter 9
The Multiple Facets and Contemporary Mission of the Images of Children in Chinese Children’s Literature

Tang Sulan
Translated by Wang Xiaohui

The term “images of children” refers to the ways adults regard and treat children and covers a variety of matters, such as children’s capabilities and features, their status and rights, the significance of childhood, and the forms and causes of children’s growth and development, as well as the relationship between education and children’s development. The image of children embraced by a given culture is the most fundamental basis for children’s literature. It plays a decisive role since the adult author’s views of children will shape the way he or she writes for them. For instance, in Britain in the early nineteenth century, some Christian writers regarded children as innately sinful beings who could not achieve salvation without rigorous discipline and control by adults. They believed that all sorts of spiritual toxins were at the root of children’s misconduct and that only strictness could eradicate or even alleviate bad behavior; thus it was natural to scold children and administer corporal punishments such as whipping. Such views of children are embodied in many classic works of Western children’s literature, in which children may suffer all kinds of physical and mental tortures, as demonstrated in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) when little Tom is punished for eating candies without permission by being caused to grow venomous spines like those of sea urchins all over his body (142).

In feudal China, children were presented with similarly frightening stories. Consider the popular educational primers The Three-Character Classic, attributed to Wang Yinglin (1223–96), and Twenty-Four Examples of Filial Piety (originally dating from the late ninth century and widely read for over a millennium), which holds up for admiration obedient sons such as Guo Ju, who intends to bury his own baby son alive so that there will be enough food for his elderly mother, and Wu Meng, who exposes himself to mosquitoes so that the well-fed insects will not bite his parents.¹ That such works could exist and thrive reflects the dominance of the view that children were the private possessions of parents.

Of course, children’s literature may also be affected by views associated with cultures elsewhere in the world. Contemporary Chinese children’s literature, which can be traced back to the May Fourth New Culture Movement beginning in 1919, has been profoundly influenced by Western children’s literature. In Chinese Children’s Literature and the Modernization Process, Zhu Ziqiang lays out his meticulous research on the images of children reflected in Chinese children’s literature. He notes that at the beginning of the twentieth century, which marked the inception of modern children’s literature in China, Zhou Zuoren had already proposed the concept of “child-oriented” views of children, and Lu Xun criticized the traditional views of children, calling on readers of his 1918 short story “A Madman’s Diary” to “save our children” (Zhu 1). Unfortunately, in practice, Zhu continues, the images of children long deviated from what might be considered “child-oriented,” leaving children’s literature to be viewed only as an educational or political tool. It was not until the reform and opening-up period, or even the twenty-first century, that our views on children began to be child-oriented again and children’s literature re-emerged as both “child-friendly” and high quality in a literary sense. Today Chinese children’s literature reflects a movement from being childish to advocating growth, from moral instruction to liberation, from perception to mental progress, from materialism to valuing the spirit of games, from seriousness to happiness and humor, from thinking of children as “blank slates” to thinking of them as “seeds,” and from short stories to novelettes and long novels. Recently, the images of children in children’s literature have returned to the starting point of the last century and have begun the pursuit of modernity in a new age, a circumstance that causes Zhu to be optimistic about the future of Chinese children’s literature.

Judging from the trends that he discusses, Zhu’s analysis and conclusions are well grounded from a historical perspective. However, when we review the twists and turns in the developmental path of Chinese children’s literature, we cannot help but worry about its future, because a country’s literature and art are always subject to the profound influence of its traditional culture. Those deep-rooted thoughts that once hindered the development of the children’s literature of China may again become obstacles. The images of children in Chinese children’s literature have always been complex and multifaceted because of the influence and the constraints of traditional Chinese culture, political situations, and theories of education. These factors, which hindered the development of Chinese children’s literature in the past, will not disappear of their own accord; on the contrary, they will continue to exist as cultural genes. A clear understanding of this point may help us to smooth the way for the return of Chinese children’s literature to a child-friendly approach and to literary excellence.

China is a country with a feudal tradition of more than 5000 years. Far from being child-oriented, traditional Chinese culture features the superiority of the aged. The principle of “father guides son,” one of “The Three Cardinal Guides” of Confucius, has given rise to the popular saying among Chinese families, “Parents always have their good reasons, and they could never be wrong.” In Standards for Being a Good Student and Child, children are taught to follow such rules as “When your parents call you, answer them right away. When they command you to do something, do it quickly. When your parents instruct you, listen respectfully. When your parents reproach you, obey and accept their scolding” (Di Zi Gui 7).² Students in private schools are required to “honor the teacher and respect his teaching,” as an ancient adage puts it, because the teacher enjoys absolute authority. In traditional Chinese culture, there is a well-known saying that the objects most deserving of veneration, in descending order of importance, are “heaven, earth, rulers, parents, and teachers”; that is, the teacher is worshiped alongside heaven and earth (Lee 549). Because of the “absolute authority of teachers,” a phrase that has long been a byword in China, students and teachers are unequal, and it is considered entirely rational for teachers to punish their students physically. In the folk culture of Guangdong province, private schools in the old days were called “rat-a-tat studios,” for “rat-a-tat” is the onomatopoeic term for children being beaten. It is generally believed in China that “to spare the rod is to spoil the child” (Zhang 34).

In short, in daily life adults, represented by teachers and parents, are omnipotent, while children need to be taught, disciplined, and instructed in morals. It is because of such concepts that didacticism came into being in children’s literature. “The Three Conceited Kittens” (1954), which was for many years considered classic children’s literature, is a typical didactic fairy tale. In this story, a mother cat finds when the summer holiday comes that her three children failed to do well in their schoolwork; therefore, she lets them catch fish to improve their skills. The three kittens go to the river bank without taking fishing equipment, only to sit along the river foolishly waiting for the fish to come to them. A mouse happens by, and pretending to be a “learned grandpa,” he chats with the naïve kittens, telling them that work is the most meaningless thing in the world. After they return home, the kittens tell their mother all the things that happened along the river, but to their surprise, she bursts into laughter after hearing what they say. She criticizes them for failing to catch fish; what is worse, they made friends with the mouse! How foolish they are! In this story, the mother cat, omniscient and omnipotent, represents adults, who are skilled, experienced, and noble. In contrast, the kittens, representing children, are innocent, ignorant, and prone to make mistakes, therefore in need of education. However, it should not be overlooked that these three little kittens have never caught a fish before, nor do they know what a mouse looks like, so it is natural for them to make mistakes. This author fails to consider children’s growth and sensibility from the children’s perspective; instead, he takes advantage of his own knowledge and experience to instruct children without thinking like them, a demonstration of his superiority over them. One would have to say that the degree of inequality between children and adults suggested by such works cannot be eliminated with mere slogans or even with a cultural movement. Even today, Standards for Being a Good Student and Child, once banned as a remnant of a feudal society, is recited by children as part of the curriculum in many schools, and is very likely to stage a comeback.

Confucianism and its ethical codes represent orthodoxy in traditional Chinese culture. Confucianism emphasizes moderation and compromise and advocates behaving oneself in accordance with certain rules, which runs contrary to the inclination of children to be lively and active. Those who accept Confucian ethics are strict with children in daily life, advocating, as the conclusion of The Three-Character Classic puts it, the idea that “reward lies ahead of diligence, and nothing is gained by indolence,” while objecting to children’s playing games. They maintain that children should “be modest and prudent, be on guard against conceit and impetuosity” (a maxim also promulgated by Mao Zedong; see Quotations 279) and object to individualization and personalization. They advocate pragmatism, while suppressing curiosity and imagination. Such traditional concepts are prevalent in the collective unconscious and have been unwittingly adopted by all Chinese; they continue to affect our views on children and our creation of children’s literature. Therefore, no matter what the era in the children’s literature of China, we may find examples of stories about children who suffer greatly due to their pride or lack of perseverance. Often such representations involve children personified as little animals, such as kittens or roosters.

A good illustration of this point is the fairy tale “Little Kitten Goes Fishing,”³ created by Jin Jin in 1952. This story is about a kitten who goes fishing with his mother. Instead of focusing on the task at hand, the kitten chases dragonflies and butterflies, so he fails to catch any fish. After his mother lectures him, he begins to concentrate on his fishing, neglecting the dragonflies and the butterflies. After a while, he, too, catches a big fish. There is no doubt that it is an inherent characteristic of children to be lively and curious, and playing is the source of a happy childhood; accordingly, it is a pity that adults would force children to sacrifice their happiness to concentrate on their study and work. “Little Kitten Goes Fishing,” popular among parents and teachers ever since its first publication, has for several decades been chosen as one of the common texts in Chinese textbooks for primary students, which is both evidence and explanation for its pervasive cultural influence.

Texts such as “Little Kitten Goes Fishing” fit neatly into China’s long literary tradition, as the essence of traditional literature is to identify and communicate approved aspirations and cultural truths, with a focus on literature’s practical functions. Politicians use literature to convey their political purposes, revolutionists employ literature to change society, and philosophers express their will and ambition through literature. For example, in his 1902 article “Fiction and the Education of the Masses,” Liang Qichao proposed, “The improvement of social governance must start from the revolution of fiction, and the emancipation of people’s minds must start from introducing new novels,” thus launching the “revolution of fiction” alongside the “revolution of poetry” (Yu 6). Even the various literary propositions and genres emerging from the New Literature Movement uniformly stressed literature’s social functions; for instance, the Literature Research Society (established in 1921) adopted the slogan “Literature is for life.”

It is thus worth mentioning that the earliest works for children in the history of modern Chinese literature were written by members of the Literature Research Society, such as Ye Shengtao and Bing Xin. Ye Shengtao’s fairy tale The Scarecrow (1923) is a typical product of the notion that “literature is for life.” In this fairy tale, the scarecrow witnesses three tragedies in a single night. The first tragedy is that the paddy field of an old blind woman is invaded by locusts, the second is that a poor fisherwoman fails to save her seriously sick child, and the last is that a young woman suffering from bullying and abuse drowns herself in the river. The scarecrow, made of straw, is unable to save them. He can do nothing but witness all these happenings helplessly; at last he cannot stand the burden and collapses on the ground. Obviously, this fairy tale emphasizes the great attention that the author paid to the downtrodden masses living in a semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. It is so overloaded with the realities of society that it has lost its sense of fantasy and imagination.

The same overemphasis on the social functions of literature led to such wartime works for children as Guan Ye’s “Yulai Did Not Die” (1948, published in the Jinchaji Daily, the precursor to People’s Daily), which praises “little heroes.” Similarly, the period of building socialism after the founding of the New China saw such long fairy tales as Zhang Tianyi’s The Secret of the Magic Gourd (1958), which opposes “laziness and gains without pains.” The period of reform and opening up, which encouraged individuality, witnessed such “neo-problem fiction” as Liu Jianping’s prizewinning “I Want My Chisel” (1983, published in Literature for Children 1), in which a teenager seeks the right to his own dreams. Even at the Symposium for the Creation of Children’s Literature in China in the winter of 2010, a new historic mission to “cultivate lofty ideals in children” was on the agenda.⁴ Eminent writers for children, such as Cao Wenxuan, have volunteered to accept the responsibility to “mold the future character of the nation” by creating well-written children’s novels (Cao 279). Indeed, children’s writers in China always shoulder responsibility for society and for the nation as a whole while putting the mission of entertaining children in second place. Therefore, it is rare to find those “meant-to-mean-nothing” works of children’s literature that were highly valued by Zhou Zuoren at the beginning of the last century; while such works exist, they are not valued by the majority of teachers and parents.

In China, then, children’s literature and children’s education are closely related. Children’s literature is not invariably intended to be educational, but it is usually assumed that it can help to cultivate and educate children. That is why works of children’s literature such as fairy tales, poems, fables, essays, and folktales have long been introduced into textbooks for children. According to “On the Teacher” (c. 802), by the Tang Dynasty writer Han Yu, the purpose of education is to “propagate the doctrine, impart professional knowledge, and resolve doubts,” which involves the development of personality and the formation of character as well as the dissemination of information. Li Jinhui, the founder of pop music in China, did not compose children’s operas to entertain children, but to promote colloquial Mandarin. The target of education is children, and the ultimate goal of education is to cultivate good character in children for the benefit of society. For a long time, the guidelines for education in China were to turn students into supporters of the revolutionary causes of proletarianism, which would develop the nation morally, intellectually, and physically. Therefore, such ideas as collectivism, patriotism, moral education, and class struggle are stressed in Chinese children’s literature. Collectivism and patriotism are given more importance than individual development; thus it is no surprise that children’s works do not promote children’s interests, temperament, individuality, and happiness.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments and Textual Note
• Introduction
• Section I: Theorizing Children’s Literature: Journey as Metaphor and Motif
• Section II: Chinese Children’s Literature and the May Fourth Movement
• Section III: Studies of American Authorship
• Section IV: A History of Didactic Children’s Literature
• Section V: Themes in Children’s Literature
• CODA On Writing Children’s Literature
• Index