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  • Shih-Wen Sue Chen & Sin Wen Lau

Representations of Children and Success in Asia: Dream Chasers


Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, a law professor from Yale, was the topic of intense debate about different parenting styles when it was first published in 2011. Following the success of this controversial book, Chua co-authored The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (2014) with her husband. They argue that wealth, power, and a high education level constitute success. Adult conceptions of success that Chua and her husband espoused are communicated to young people not only by parents but also through books, films, and television shows that children consume.


Representations of Children and Success in Asia: Dream Chasers

Our edited book Representations of Children and Success in Asia: Dream Chasers (2022) is the first to examine how success is represented for children across Asia in picturebooks, novels, films, television series, archival documents, and oral interviews. The volume has 18 contributors from 10 countries exploring conceptualizations of success and childhood in Japan, South Korea, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India. They highlight the similarities and differences in how success is defined for children and young adults in the region. Some of the chapters explore how friendship, community, tradition, morality, and individual agency are challenged as young people pursue success. Others point out how some texts try to reinforce narrow understandings of success as becoming wealthy, conforming to traditional gender roles and racial stereotypes, adhering to an Anglocentric worldview, and acquiring 21st century workplace skills.


The three chapters in the section titled Educational Success discuss the extremes that both adults and children go to in order to achieve academic excellence. The texts that the contributors analyze, South Korea’s Sky Castle (2018), Japan’s The Family Game (1983) and Assassination Classroom (2015-2016), as well as India’s Five Point Someone (2004) and Three Idiots (2009), provide a powerful critique of the negative consequences that a single-minded pursuit of educational achievement can bring, such as the loss of one’s humanity, broken families, and suicide.



The next segment, Cultural Politics of Success considers how factors such as economics, gender, and class shape Asian understandings of success for young people. The first chapter in this section analyzes a range of texts from the PRC that focus on money, including Ma Liang and The Magic Paintbrush (1955), A Cheng’s Turtle (1983), and the Jia Li and Jia Mei book series (1993). The next chapter turns to India’s urban slums through an examination of Trash! On Ragpicker Children and Recycling (2003) and Dear Mrs. Naidu (2015). Finally, this section includes an exegesis of how Jack Neo’s I Not Stupid (2000), I Not Stupid Too (2006), and We Not Naughty (2012) depict success for girls in Singapore.



The chapters in Success and the Nation explicate the relationship between success and citizenship by considering how the texts attempt to mold children into ideal citizens. Drawing on archival documents and oral interviews, the chapter “To be Red” provides insight into how children who grew up during the Cultural Revolution conceived of success. Indonesian films are the focus of the following chapter which considers the importance of preserving traditional and Islamic values as the country modernizes. Continuing the discussion on the theme of nationhood and “Indonesian” identity, the third chapter examines how representations of success for young people are politicized in two West Papuan films, Aku Ingin Menciummu Sekali Saja (I want to Kiss You Just Once, 2002), and Denias, Senandung di atas Awan (Denias, Singing on the Clouds, 2006). The final chapter in this section evaluates best-selling children’s books in Taiwan against the Twelve-Year Basic Education Curriculum developed by the Ministry of Education.



The final section, Success in the World rounds off the book by highlighting the agency of young people in redefining ideas about success in the family, community, and the world. Contemplating the role of young people in the face of global environmental disasters, the first chapter in this section proposes a concept called “ecoagency” and applies it to a reading of two Chinese films, The Ozone Layer Vanishes (1990) and The Wandering Earth (2019). “Saviors of the World” introduces the idea of “impersonality” as key to success in two Japanese animated films, Your Name. [1] [2] (2016) and Weathering with You (2019). Our focus shifts to Vietnam in the following chapter which examines how middle-class children’s reading transforms them into urban, globalized citizens. The last chapter in the book interrogates the cultural, linguistic, and ideological content of picturebooks from Nobuyoung’s popular EFL program for young Korean children and reveals that ideas of success are closely linked to white, middle-class, Anglocentric narratives.



Throughout the book, we noticed that there was a common desire expressed by children to have the freedom to define success for themselves. This dream is shared irrespective of whether or not the young people were rich, middle-class, or poor; whether they lived in rural or urban areas or not, and whether they were part of the dominant or a marginalized racial group or not. Our volume has tapped into just a small section of the rich repository of texts for young people produced in Asia. We hope our book is just one of many future monographs that further engage with how success is represented in children’s texts from this diverse region.


This book will be launched online on 9 Feb 2023 at 11 am (GMT +8). To register, please go to our Eventbrite page.



 

Shih-Wen Sue Chen (PhD, Australian National University) is an Associate Professor in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia and current president of the Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research. She is the author of Children’s Literature and Transnational Knowledge in Modern China: Education, Religion, and Childhood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 (Routledge, 2013) and the co-editor of Representations of Children and Success in Asia: Dream Chasers (Routledge, 2022). Her current research project focuses on science in nineteenth-century English and Chinese children’s literature.


Sin Wen Lau

Sin Wen Lau (PhD, ANU) is Senior Lecturer in the Chinese Programme at the University of Otago. Her research interests include the anthropology of China, religion, gender, children, and youth. She is the author of Overseas Chinese Christians in Contemporary China (Brill 2020).

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