Our First Chinese-Language Book Published

World's Edge Books & Publishing has just released its first Chinese book: Lina Mao Dickson's translation of our children's book I Drink Mommy's Milk: A Book About Mammals.  I am happy to announce that the book is now in our inventory and available for ordering through our website.  Please note that this is the Chinese-character-only edition; a bilingual edition with characters, pinyin, and English translation will be available in November 2010.

Issues in Chinese Librarianship: Collection Development and Access for Children and Families: An Annotated Bibliography

The goal of this bibliography is to present a core of scholarly articles detailing some of the basic issues relevant to Chinese librarianship in North America, with a focus on service to families and children. 

The nineteen articles in this bibliography have been chosen to provide North American librarians new to Chinese librarianship a broad overview of the main problems and controversies that they are likely to face in working with Chinese collections and attempting to provide the best possible service to children and families in that context. 

Since this is a rapidly developing field of inquiry, only articles written in the 1990s or later have been included; six of the nineteen articles were written in the last two years, and most (fifteen out of nineteen) were published in the year 2000 or later.

The authors discuss representations of Chinese people and Chinese culture in literature for children, the appropriation of Chinese narratives in mainstream American fiction, the current status of the Chinese publishing industry, service to Chinese-speaking children and families, cataloging and retrieval issues, and the role of new technologies in improving access to online and print resources.

In 2000, nearly 3,000,000 people in the United States identified their ethnic background as being wholly or partly Chinese.  After India, China provides more graduate students to U.S. universities than any other foreign country (Werling, 2009).  It is therefore crucial for North American librarians to pay more systematic attention to serving Chinese and Chinese-American patrons and communities in their institutions.

Recent Chinese immigrants may be unfamiliar with North American school and library conventions.  In China and other Asian countries, for instance, school lessons consist mostly of rote learning (Ho, 1990), and Chinese students may be accustomed to more structured lessons and may be less comfortable than American students with asking for help or expressing their needs and opinions (Werling, 2009).  Libraries also tend to be very different from their American counterparts (Werling, 2009) and to be used mostly for studying for tests, working on homework, and socializing rather than for pleasure reading or borrowing books (Ho, 1990).  Therefore, providing the best possible service to Chinese immigrants and their children in North American libraries may involve working to understand and sometimes modify different perspectives on the role of the library in families’ lives.  Orientation programming may help to acclimatize families to the way that North American libraries work.  “If the parents are better oriented to a new culture,” Werling (2009) points out, “they will be able to help their children adapt and cope better (p. 45).

Criteria for judging the “quality” of resources for child and adult audiences may be somewhat different for those who are limited by a language handicap (Ho, 1990), whether as Chinese immigrants looking for information in an English-speaking library environment or as Anglophone learners of Chinese as a second or foreign language.  And those who are not proficient in English may have difficulty understanding what is said during library tours and other library events (Werling, 2009).

Asian Studies departments in academic libraries have recently become important sources of information and pleasure reading for recent immigrants, and some big-city public library branches have recently been developing extensive Chinese collections.   For example, the Chinese Heritage Collection and Chinese language materials held by the Chinatown Branch of the Chicago Public Library form about one-half of the branch’s adult collection and about one-tenth of its children’s collection (Werling, 2009); the Queens Borough Public Library in New York City a 93,000-item collection of Chinese resources, WorldLinQ software that provides Web access and native-language searching capabilities to patrons speaking Asian (and other) languages, as well as services that include cultural arts events and coping skills programs for new Americans and a commitment to recruiting staff with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Strong, 1998).  But overall there is a need for academic, public, and school libraries to focus more systematically on providing Chinese resources and services for families and children and on improving access to those resources and services.

Recent immigrants are not the only user groups for Chinese collections in North American libraries, of course.  The diverse populations served by these collections also include scholars in Asian-studies programs and other academic departments such as linguistics, economics, business, comparative literature, history, library and information science, and education; second-, third-, and fourth-generation Chinese Americans and people of mixed ethnic/racial background with widely varying levels of Chinese-language proficiency and connection to Chinese culture; adoptees whose families may know little about Chinese language or culture but want to give their children a connection to their ancestral homeland; and non-Chinese children and adults studying Chinese as a world language or simply wishing to learn a little about Chinese or Chinese-American culture as part of a general multicultural education. 

This brief bibliography is in no way comprehensive but serves as a brief introduction to the problems of Chinese librarianship for those new to the field and particularly for those serving children and families.  Chinese is now the language with the largest number of native speakers in the world and the third most commonly spoken tongue in both the United States (after English and Spanish) and Canada (after English and French), and it is hoped that this situation will be reflected in the collections of more North American libraries in the near future.  Collection-development librarians in public, school, and university libraries will need to familiarize themselves with the problems involved as well as with the growing number of books and other resources that are available.  

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE.

CITATION INFORMATION:

Siu, Susan C. H.  (2009).  Issues in Chinese Librarianship: Collection Development and Access for Children and Families: An Annotated Bibliography.  Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/issuesinchineselibrarianship.

Review of Play & Learn Chinese with Mei Mei 1

Review of Play & Learn Chinese with Mei Mei 1, produced by Mei Mei Hu.  North Providence, Rhode Island: Mei Mei & Me, 2006.  41 minutes


For parents like me who don't buy into the showy vacuity of "educational" network shows like Dora the Explorer and Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, Mei Mei Hu's old fashioned calmness and authenticity will come as a breath of fresh air.  The first DVD of eight (so far) in her Play & Learn series is low-tech, slow, and didactic by current videographic standards but is thoughtfully organized and extremely effective an as educational tool.  


Mei Mei Hu understands children.  Youngsters who are young enough or sheltered enough not to have been too frequently exposed to the hysterical pace of twenty-first century children's programming will recognize Mei Mei--who reminds me in some ways of the immortal Fred Rogers--as a gifted, caring, and intelligent teacher who respects them as equally smart, capable, well-intentioned human beings.  Toddlers and preschoolers will enjoy learning real Chinese phrases and vocabulary from Mei Mei and will soon be singing along with the simple, catchy, traditional tunes that she introduces.


The program is divided into eight short segments, each of which contains just the right proportion of repetition and novelty to hold children's attention while ensuring that they remember what they have learned.  The choice of vocabulary also lends itself to reinforcement by parents and teachers in everyday home and classroom situations.  Topics covered include Numbers, Parts of the Body, Actions, Greetings, Family, Names, and Ages.


Most of the program segments follow a fairly predictable sequence in which Mei Mei presents new vocabulary twice, very clearly and slowly; the English translation appears on the screen the first time.  One or two children, who do not seem to be native speakers of Chinese but who do pronounce the words clearly and correctly, then recite or demonstrate the same words and phrases a couple of times.  In later segments, the children perform dialogues that would be easy to reproduce in a kindergarten or Saturday-school setting.  Parts IV (Games) and IX (Songs) introduce a wonderful variety of memorable tunes, along with games and drills to help parents and teachers teach and reinforce them.


If your children are learning Chinese, this is a fundamental program to include in your home or school DVD library.  Recommended for ages 1 to 6.

Review of Gordon & Li Li Learn Animals in Mandarin

Gordon & Li Li Learn Animals in Mandarin, by Michele Wong McSween, illustrated by Nam Doan.  McWong Ink, 2010.   $9.99  ISBN 978-0-9820881-2-8

Michele Wong McSween's bright and colorful "Gordon & Li Li" board books are simple enough to be enjoyed by the youngest babies but will also hold the attention of active preschoolers.  

The first book, Gordon & Li Li: Words for Everyday, was illustrated by Kevin Murawski, who has also done some "Harold and the Purple Crayon" board-book spinoffs.  In that book McSween introduced Gordon & Li Li, blue and pink panda cousins who live in Brooklyn, New York, and Beijing, China, respectively.  Each page featured a simple, straightforward drawing of one or both pandas posing with an everyday object.  The English word was printed at the top of the page and the Chinese word in pinyin transcription at the bottom.  The words chosen ranged from "ball" to "bath" to "apple" to "shoes" to "cell phone," and a couple of phrases--"Good job!" and "See you next time!" were introduced at the end of the book.  Altogether, 26 words and phrases were included, which seems to be a perfect number to fit the attention span of a busy toddler and to allow both child and parents to remember everything with repeated readings. 

McSween's brand-new sequel, Gordon & Li Li Learn Animals in Mandarin, released on March 1 of this year, is even more charming and better conceptualized than the first book.  The new illustrator, Nam Doan, has added an element of humor to the pictures that leaves my nearly-four-year-old son rolling in the aisles time after time.  Instead of merely posing smilingly in each illustration, Gordon & Li Li are active and have more personality in this book.  Li Li squats on a lily pad with the frog, charms the snake, and waddles with the chicken, while Gordon leads a family of ducklings on a walk, sunbathes with an alligator, and chews a blade of grass with a cow.  

The text, still limited to one word per page, is also more useful to Chinese-language learners in this new book.  As well as the English and pinyin versions of each word, the author has included simplified characters (the words range from one to three characters each) and an English-based phonetic transcription of the Mandarin pronunciation.  For someone like me who is trying to learn Chinese characters and teach them to my children, I was very grateful to have both the pinyin and characters for each word.  The English phonetic transcription is not necessary for my purposes, but they may be helpful to readers who are not familiar with the conventions of pinyin, including even some native speakers of Chinese dialects, such as my husband, who does not remember how to read characters and never learned pinyin as a child.

Young children will be charmed by the bold, bright colors and amusing images of this book and will ask to read it again and again.  It is simple enough that, after a few readings, they will be able to start supplying the Chinese words themselves and to feel a sense of pride at having learned some real Chinese, which will motivate them to learn more and to develop their tolerance for longer, more complicated Chinese-language or bilingual books.  Recommended for ages 0-6.

Review of LET'S WRITE CHINESE WITH MEI MEI

Let's Write Chinese with Mei Mei, Books 1 & 2, by Mei Mei Hu.  Providence, Rhode Island: Mei Mei and Me, 2007.  $12.95 (2-book set)  ISBN 1-4243-1539-5.


The Foreign Service Institute lists Chinese as a Category 3 language--a language that's exceptionally difficult for English-speaking adults to learn, requiring twice as much study time as, say, Georgian, Turkish, or Vietnamese.  I assume that this classification is based on the complexity of the Chinese writing system, since the spoken language is not particularly difficult.  People like me who are trying to learn and thousands of Chinese characters and find ways of teaching them to our young children can use all the help we can get.

Mei Mei Hu's two-book set of Chinese-character writing workbooks features 176 single characters (Book I) and 176 two-character compound words and phrases (Book II) with four words or phrases per page and six large spaces in which to practice writing each character.  The number of words introduced in each book would be ideal to cover in a year-long Saturday-school course or a semester-long Chinese immersion course.  Children familiar with Mei Mei's "Play & Learn" DVD series will be happy to see many words whose meanings they already know.

These large-format books are easy for young children to handle, and the characters are carefully arranged so as to make them as easy to remember as possible.  The simplest and most common characters are taught first, and more difficult characters and compounds words and phrases are introduced gradually.  The first character of each compound in Book II is a character previously introduced in Book I, and most of the compounds are arranged in groups of four words or phrases with the same initial character, helping to reinforce characters already learned and set a foundation for further vocabulary development.

Mei Mei Hu's books are an essential tool in any child's Chinese-language education, especially considering that there are so few other character-writing workbooks available for English-speaking children; I have seen none of comparable intuitiveness and simplicity.  Recommended for ages 5 and up.