Negligent Framing of Non-Western Cultures in Children’s Literature

Myths, Legends and Folklore are topics that I’m deeply interested in and my love for it stems from the years I had devoted to pouring through volumes of them in any library I could find. As I still keep up to date with this decade’s retelling of the stories I’ve grown up on, a recent book that had caught my eye was the Ladybird Tales of Adventurous Girls. It’s attempt at putting together stories from all around the world is one that I deeply admire and respect. However, the way it was put together seemed so incredibly negligent and honestly, awful that it made me think deeply about the degree of care publishers must exercise when engaging with stories from the Global South. What’s surprising is that many of the issues that I’ve flagged aren’t even problems that can only fixed by diversifying your workforce or having more sensitivity readers. Several of these little oddities that seemed weird to me could have been easily fixed by being consistent alone. Given that these books are intended for a younger audience, publishers must truly be more meticulous as these are books that will frame the way children see the world around them as they grow up.

I wasn’t expecting to be thrown off guard so quickly but the Foreword by Jacqueline Wilson, kicked things off on the wrong foot for me for its limiting approach towards female empowerment. As a self-proclaimed feminists whose novels have been a huge hit with girls, Wilson’s note surprised me as it seems to be deeply laced with internalised misogyny. It first started with a quote (“I got a bit tired of all these princesses. They seemed a rather silly bunch, for all their beauty.”) which probably could have touched upon what the damsels in distress lacked without faulting them for their supposedly fault-free visage. I mean she does make perfectly valid points when she questions and states, “Why couldn’t they rescue themselves? I wanted them to outwit the baddies in the books. It would be wondertul if they were clever and courageous and prepared to go on amazing adventures.” Being clever, courageous and prepared are all qualities that we want and LOVE to see in girls but she frames it in a highly awkward manner. When she proclaims that “None of the heroines [in this collection] happen to have long curly hair or frilly frocks or satin slippers,” Wilson falsely dichotomises beauty from capability and ability without realising that the latter two can be impacted by the first. I’m not sure if it is just a product of its time but 2022 isn’t too far off from 2018 and regardless of Jacqueline’s equivocal feelings about #MeToo, her ambivalence towards the transgender issue or her qualms regarding gender-neutral toilets which you are free to avoid if you “preferred a bit of privacy”, this branch of feminism that puts down other girls to uplift other girls is not for me.

So now that critic within me had been roused, I couldn’t help but to analyse the collection with more anal eyes. I didn’t have to look far for the first thing that struck me as weird was the content page itself. We’ve got stories featuring Gretel, Tamasha, Tokoyo, Chandra and even Gerda for ‘The Snow Queen’ but when it came to the ‘Sea Girl and the Golden Key’, the hero of that tale was just Sea Girl. Disregarding the fact that names have power and the peculiarity of leaving people from a particular culture nameless, it’s a weirdly inconsistent thing to do that just doesn’t make sense. Another thing that didn’t make sense was the question on authorship which opened up a whole new can of worms. While the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson had been cited as authors, the rest of the short stories were credited to Zanzibar, India, China and Japan only. Once again, this seems awfully convenient. Surely an editorial decision could have been made to just attribute the source culture if the authors cannot be traced? As I had gotten skeptical, I started to read the stories more closely and had even googled them after since things weren’t adding up to me. While I had learned more about the cultural background of these stories, my real eyes had also realised that some of these attributions aren’t even accurate!

We can all thank the absolutely bonkers ‘Tokoyo and the Sea Serpent’ for this. As someone who reads extensively on Japanese folklore, this story was completely new to me so I looked at it keenly. The first thing that struck me as weird was the “ama — women who dived deep under the sea to find pearl oysters, sea snails and other beautiful shells” as it reminded me of the haenyeos from Korea who took on a very similar role on their side of the East Sea. Curious about its accuracy, I googled this and I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that both countries actually had such strong, female only professions in common with one another which was very nice to learn about. That said, the next on my list concerning the sacrifice of a maiden to a sea serpant is less straight forward. At about halfway through the story, Tokoyo stops an act of gendered violence from happening:

“You must be a stranger here if you do not know of the terrible curse on these islands,” the priest replied. “An evil sea serpent lives here in a cave beneath the ocean. The serpent will whip up terrible storms and destroy us all if we don’t sacrifice a young girl to it every year.”

As someone who is very interested in Korean culture and literature, this bit reminded me of The Tale of Sim Chong (Sim Cheong-jeon) a Korean classical novel about a filial daughter named Sim Cheong who throws herself into the Indang Sea as a sacrifice so that her blind father can regain his eyesight. Aside from this possible conflation (which I will elaborate upon later), the sea serpent’s link to the Emperor’s curse which kick started the story was also highly tenuous. The priest claims that the sacrifice is an annual tradition but there was no indication that the story had happened for long enough or for more than a year even for such an act to be regarded as a recurring practice. Did no one think that the way the story was told was weird when they were putting it together?

In light of all these confusion, the investigator within me had managed to amass quite a bit of information to answer my questions. The myth featuring Tokoyo had actually been recorded by Richard Gordon Smith (a British traveler, sportsman, and naturalist who traveled extensively in the late 19th century and lived in Japan for a number of year. It was first published in either 1918 (or 1908 since I found two conflicting sources) in a book titled Ancient Tales and Folk-Lore of Japan. As observed by some commentators, there seem to be no Japanese sources confirming the story, and Smith himself had even pointed out in the preface of the story that he did not verify it and does not vouch for its authenticity:

THE stories in this volume are transcribed from voluminous illustrated diaries which have been kept by me for some twenty years spent in travel and in sport in many lands — the last nine of them almost entirely in Japan, while collecting subjects of natural history for the British Museum; trawling and dredging in the Inland Sea, sometimes with success, sometimes without, but in the end contributing to the treasury some fifty things new to Science, and, according to Sir Edwin Ray Lankester, ‘adding greatly to the knowledge of Japanese Ethnology.’

As scholars have concluded that Sim Cheong-jeon must have existed as a complete work by the 18th century, the possibility of there being a conflation of the two stories is highly possible. In addition, the sea serpant’s requests for virgins, the slaying of the monster in its lair, and the recovery of a treasure had been observed to have more in common with European dragons and Beowulf than any of their Japanese counterpart. Given that Smith had even referred to his diaries as “Ill-Spelled Diaries”, that this story comes from Britain would have been a lot more accurate.

As any conversation on an illustrated book would not be complete without touching upon its art, my last point will be on its use of colour. Going back to ‘Tokoyo and the Sea Serpent’ once again, it was rather puzzling how the characters’ skin ended up being such a glorious shade of chartreuse. Beyond this, yet another questionable use of palette could be seen in the ‘The Snow Queen’. While the story makes no mention of it, many of the villains were unnecessarily depicted with dark skin tones, in stark contrast to the protagonist’ fairness. As a children’s picture book, images like these matters and (unintentional?) oversights like this should not be happening. While the illustrations are altogether charming, its choice of colours makes them awkward and uncomfortable. When occurrences like these happen, efforts towards creating representation are swiftly undermined, as they only seem farcicle. Altogether, despite it’s ambitious attempt to diversify learning resources that are made available to children, my overall impression of this collection is that they are skewed towards a very particular audience that would only perpetuate negative stereotypes in the long run.