By the time you read this I will in Beijing, China. Our fabulous Executive Director, Aimee Strittmatter, and I have been invited to speak about American children’s library work at the Chinese Library Association Conference. Our whirlwind visit will include a tour of the National Children’s Library, the Children’s Library of Beijing and another location intriguingly referred to as Juvenile & Children Reading Experience Wonderland. We also hope to see the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and maybe even (please, please, please) a panda cub or two.
Our Chinese counterparts are particularly interested in learning more about our Caldecott Award and the role that libraries play in making that award the catalyst for the creation of and celebration of great children’s picture books it has become. In 2009, China inaugurated their own award for children’s literature called the Zikai Award named for a famous Chinese cartoonist and modeled after the Caldecott . It is exhilarating to learn of the far reach of our distinguished and highly regarded awards. I know how hard our members work to ensure that every year the criteria and integrity of the award is maintained and the best books find their way, literally, into the world.
Saturday morning we are meeting to discuss children’s reading with some Chinese children’s literature experts. I look forward to discovering the common threads we will see in our respective “great books for children.” Is excellence in literature for children the same in every language and culture? We are always more alike than we imagine but the value of seeing life in another country also gives perspective to our own.
Many of the challenges faced by our countries are shared. The quality of education, the desire to provide the best opportunities for children and their families with limited public resources; these are human concerns, not American ones. Libraries play a role in that work not just in America, where personal freedom is assumed, but perhaps libraries play an even more critical role in communities vastly different from our own.
I can’t wait to share what we learn in China with our members back in the states. My hope is that our time will give important insights into the value of what we continue to hold dear. Our best resource remains each other, those of us who do this work, wherever in the world we are.