By Dr. Fawzia Mai Tung

At the end of every month, back in 1960s Parisian elementary schools, we would receive our report cards. If we ranked first, which was usually the case both for my sister in her class and me in mine, we would receive a prize: a beautiful book. 

My parents were proud of us, but my uncle too. He was also a lover of literature, so at the end of the trimester, he would go out of his way to buy us a book each as well. Two of them remain imprinted in my memory: a selection of Andersen Fairy Tales entitled “Ib et Christine”, and a collection of Chinese legends. Each book was immense, at least in my child’s eyes, hardcover, and marvelously illustrated with wistful art. 

To this day, I see in my mind’s eye the little girl lighting matches, wrapped in a fraying shawl, squatting against a wall, her whitish hair swirling around her in a sepia monochrome painting. The Chinese figures, on the other hand, were highly colorful and intriguing to me. Today, as a more informed adult Chinese, I realize that the costumes were totally incongruous, but it did not matter to me then. I was entranced by the underwater dancers in long red, pink, and coral skirts and ribbons waving in the water like goldfish tails; the eighth prince in a green warrior armor reminiscent of turtle scales.

The illustrations were the primary attraction of these wondrous books. I’d pore over them every day, and attempt reading them over and over until I could master every single sentence. I wondered about the strange messages in them. Why did Ib get only a bit of black earth in his hazelnut? Yet, why was it supposed to be the best of the three? Why did Christine have to die?  And the tale about Death coming to pick up the sick child from the mother who was refusing to let him go. How horrified I was, yet how beautiful was that picture of a tender mother with a child wrapped in a woolen blanket, her tears balanced on the edge of the lid! The angel of death looming silently in the background…

When I became a mother, I tried to recreate those deeply romantic experiences in my children. However, I had difficulty finding well-written or beautifully illustrated collections of fairy tales. There were plenty of books with garish, tacky pictures, and so badly written I’d cringe. So I would retell them in my own way to my children, conjuring beautiful scenes and giving soulful conversations to the characters, punctuated with much acting.

Along the way, I’d also found out that Grimm’s Fairy Tales were really very grim, and had been cleaned up by modern writers to fit with our modern view of what children should and should not be reading about. Disney reshaped them further for general entertainment. Some of Perrault’s fairy tales never took off in America, possibly because they had not been completely sterilized properly.

I also tried looking for modern fairy tales. Oh, there was another surprise. Today’s authors of “fairy tales” pen something more like fantasy fiction. Novel-length tales with no illustrations to break up the expanse of words… Would a child read it and marvel at the magic of it all? I don’t think so. I tried reading some of these “fairy novels” and was bored to tears.

In a way, these might have been why I decided to write updated fairy tales. The countless children I told stories to sprang out of my head to help direct the flow of my storytelling. Inevitably, the resulting first book was a unanimous success with my middle-grade students who absolutely relished the magical plot thread. But they also loved the modern take: allowing their voices as listeners to be heard. I made sure to insert beautiful watercolors that combined a contemporary cartoonish look to an artistic feel.

“There is some sort of unwritten rule that books with pictures are for little kids only.”

~ Dr. Fawzia Mai Tung

To my great surprise, when I read the book to my five-year-old granddaughter, she was totally entranced by it too. I had feared that the language and vocabulary were a bit advanced for her, as were the topics discussed. But no, she lapped it all! When the story was over, she remained silent for a long while, taking the book from my hands, and flipping the pages to savor the paintings. Then she asked me questions about the characters, the plot, and other details. 

More interestingly, high school students also loved the book, though some felt embarrassed to be reading a fairy tale. There is some unwritten rule that books with pictures are for little kids only. Fairy tales are for kiddies too. Yet the truth is that so many teenagers still love fairy tales. Do we wonder why fantasy novels sell so well? It’s simply an advanced genre of fairy tales. 

So I say, let’s remove the veil of embarrassment from fairy tale literature. Let older children or even adults enjoy reading them. Let them analyze and discuss the underlying psychology like they would a thick 19^th-century classic novel. Let them admire well-painted illustrations. And let the fairy tales make them better readers and excellent thinkers!