介绍:
Lincoln: Now, Cao Wenxuan became the first Chinese author to win the Hans Christian Andersen award for children’s literature. Wu You, maybe you can enlighten us a little bit further.
WY: The Beijing-based author Cao Wenxuan has won the the Hans Christian Andersen award. This award is also called the Little Nobel Prize for Literature. This time, the jury also said Cao was a unanimous choice for the prize. Actually, Cao is a professor from Peking University, and he is drawing from his own childhood experiences.
Lincoln: That’s quite interesting. So he’s drawing on these childhood experiences – it says he grew up in backbreaking poverty in Jiangsu province, and he was the son of a principal for rural primary schools, so that’s quite interesting that he’s made it all the way there.
WY: He also recounts his childhood to record that he often had nothing much to eat, and would look forward to having a meal of rice gruel once every 15 days.
Lincoln: Oh, wow. For a children’s book, that seems to be quite a complex and quite an adult theme
Michael: Well, I think maybe he’s writing about these experiences, about how tough his childhood was, but maybe writing about it in quite a romanticized way, maybe through rose-tinted glasses – “the way things used to be”, and maybe harking back to a simpler time. I mean, I can’t imagine, if it’s a children’s book, if it’s aimed a fairly young children, I don’t imagine you would have great themes of poverty and hardship there.
Lincoln: You know, I think we often don’t give young people and children enough credit when it comes to the themes in books and stuff like that. They grasp these ideas, you know, this idea that children shouldn’t or can’t understand or comprehend or appreciate these quite heavy themes, as it were, but I think they can, for the most part. I think they can.
Michael: Yeah, I mean, if you look at Hansel and Gretel, for example, that’s absolutely horrifying.
Lincoln: That’s a horrifying story.
Michael: That’s two children being abducted by an old woman, and then cooking her in an oven.
Lincoln: Yeah, it’s pretty terrible, and also, just a little bit later than that, Harry Potter. Harry Potter’s got themes of death, and multiple characters die in the books as well.
Michael: Well, I mean, you could argue, with Potter, that there are seven or eight different books, and each is one year after the other in his school life, so you could argue, the older that he himself gets, the more serious and the more death-orientated the books become, and its almost like it goes from children’s literature to young adult.
Lincoln: Yeah, I do think you can definitely see it becoming a little bit darker, but I think those themes were already there in the first and the second books somewhat, but let’s get back to this. So, I’m quite interested now in what actually entertains young Chinese children. So this is what young kids are reading, and this is what is being presented to them, and from the outside, at least, there’s an acknowledgement of some sort of merit, some sort of artist merit. Now, what did you watch? What did you read when you were growing up, Wu You?
WY: As a little kid, my mum would read me some books, like Hans Christian Andersen’s books. That was in Chinese – it had already been translated.
Lincoln: Was it western books, or was it also Chinese books? [WY: Both] OK. What were the Chinese books like?
WY: In Chinese we have the [Four] Great Works, the Monkey King.
Lincoln: OK, the Monkey King. That’s something that we still see today, yeah.
Michael: I think one of the reasons this is such a big deal is it’s the first time a Chinese author has won the Hans Christian Andersen prize.
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