building a quality kids' Chinese library

For the past few years, I have been on a mission to:

a.) find quality age-appropriate kids’ books in Chinese

b.) learn to read them so I can read them to my kids and

c.) read them to my kids

It hasn’t been easy.

When I was last in Hong Kong, I purchased a few kids’ books - completely at random. I went home, tried to learn to read them and realized that though they are children’s stories, they are FULL of text and difficult words - they felt too daunting to learn for the stage I was at during that time. If you flip through an English children’s book and imagine that you are an English Language Learner, you will suddenly see that these stories aren’t meant for kids or new language learners to read - they’re written for their literate caretakers to read to them.

Then half a year later when I was in a Chinese bookstore in Toronto, I randomly chose a few more books that were much more elementary i.e. a picture of a fruit and the name of the fruit next to it. This was still at the beginning of my Chinese reading journey and I didn’t even know the difference between Traditional and Simplified Chinese yet, so I carted home a bunch of books written in a text I wasn’t learning. Whoops!

Fast forward to some time later, my sister passes on a HUGE stack of [Traditional] Chinese kids’ books to me from when her daughter was younger and my parents had brought her a ton of books from Hong Kong. Score! Now I’ve got a starter library of books and they’re in the right language! I still can’t fully read them, but I’ve got better tools in my toolbox so I can learn them much faster. But… the stories seem very inappropriate for my young kids! I find many of them very violent, heavily moralistic, fatalistic and/or propagandistic. For example: if you don’t eat your dinner, you will waste away until you drift away on the wind and never see your family again. Or, if you don’t respect those in charge or disobey the rules, you will die. That is a general storyline for so many of the stories, but just with different characters and settings!

I think I’ll be more open to these stories when the kids are older, and we can unpack the themes together and have discussions around them, but I don’t think that’ll be anytime soon. I also wonder whether my sensitivity to this material is a product of cross-cultural dissonance for me as I am Canadian-born? I wonder if a Hong Kong parent my age would take any issue with these books? I know I am a very sensitive person to a lot of things - it’s easy for me to tip into some deep existentialism - and not for the first time, I wonder how much of that is influenced by me growing up in this cross-cultural first-generation chasm - a child of immigrants that neither fully belongs in the Chinese household, nor in the dominant society. That being said, I am very sensitive about exposing my young kids to violence at their current ages and don’t want my kids reading a lot of these stories at this time.

The dilemma for me is that I really want to expose my kids to Chinese books. I believe books are one of the most effective gateways for learning, for questioning, for conversation, for curiosity… I have a deep love and respect for the power of the mere presence of a book. But what happens when these books are hard to come by, and the ones you can get your hands on do not align with your current values? I found myself asking which I value more: having exposure to the written Chinese language in my house or only having books I feel good about on the shelves? I scoured through the pile of books and finally decided to keep about 10 books on the shelf, and tuck away the other 30 or so.

Here’s a little glimpse of the ones I just could not keep displayed on the shelves:

Top left to bottom right: someone pouring hot oil into barrels where thieves are hiding, whipping a dog to death, suicide, witch burning. Aren't these topics you're just jumping to introduce to your 4-year-old?!

And some that I decided I could live with on the shelves:

The decision to keep the Disney Princess books was particularly difficult for me because

a.) I try hard to keep franchised merchandise out of the house

b.) the English translations of the stories aren't great and

c.) the stories themselves are not ones I’d normally choose to read to my kids...

But when my daughter saw them, she was actually excited about “her Chinese princess books” and would ask me to read them to her! That was very exciting for me because in the past, she has rejected Chinese hard! She still wanted it read in “English only”… but she’d tolerate me reading both languages so I call that a WIN!

In the meantime, I feel SO fortunate to have recently learned about Little Kozzi, an online bookstore that carries mostly Traditional Chinese books (rare!), run by two Chinese-Canadian moms! (female BIPOC entrepreneur power!) I’ve been able to connect with them to get book recommendations based on what I enjoy reading to the kids in general, AND the level of Chinese I can read, which has been enormously helpful. There has also been a growing movement of other people on journeys like mine - foreign-born heritage Chinese parents who want to pass language on to their children but don’t know how to read Chinese very well/at all - and they are writing their own English-Traditional Chinese bilingual books - sometimes even with Jyutping (a romanization system for Cantonese specifically)! It is such an amazing and exciting movement for us Cantonese heritage learners out there.

My shelves are slowly starting to fill up with Chinese books that are age-appropriate for my kids AND that I can comfortably stand behind - a truly amazing feeling that I do not take for granted. Now... if only I lived in a city where I could take out Chinese books from the library!!!