A FOREVER STORY

This is a story about, ahem, a story. Like all good fairy tales it begins with the tried and trusted OUAT: Once upon a time, here goes, there was a story from the Kingdom of Stories. When it was born, it was only a small dot, without name or content, or anything. So opens the fairy tale Shenme Yemeiyoude Gushi (A Story That Has Nothing) by Long Xiangmei, winner of the Chen Bochui International Children's Literature Award in 2019.

It had ambitions. It aspired to become an eternal story that would live in people's heart forever. The story thus started traveling around hoping to "catch" some characters. As it went on, a lion, a rabbit, a girl and a grandmother accidentally entered the story one by one, but all left, for different reasons.

The dismayed story, like a character, traveled aimlessly in a snowy winter. It worried that it would soon disappear because nobody could remember it. But it had nothing really to fear. To its surprise, when Shenme ended, it was actually known by many children.

The 75-page Shenme Yemeiyoude Gushi is one of five books in a new series of fairy tales－Once Upon a Time, There Was a Story (Congqian Youyige Gushi)－written by Long from the Chinese mainland and illustrated by Monica Liaw from Taiwan.

Published recently, the five books range from 56 to 80 pages. The other four, with different themes, are Zhouzhoubabade Chengshi (A Crumpled City), Weini Zhangyike Yingtaoshu (Grow a Cherry Tree for You), Zhuzai Wudingshangde Xiaoren (The Little People Living on the Roof ), and Liushou Renjiande Jingling (The Fairies That Stayed in the Human World).

Long's stories are imaginative. Interesting characters find adventure in inconspicuous corners of familiar surroundings of cities or rural areas, carrying their own longings or worries. The stories do not always end happily, but often with inevitable departures and acceptable changes. That's life.

Long employs a simple poetic language to create these stories about love, history, environmental protection, friendship and growth, imparting them with a seasoning of melancholy. That explains why some grown-up readers had moist eyes after reading these stories.

"Writing a fairy tale, one often needs to go back to one's childhood to use a child's eyes and mind to see and think about the world," she says.

Born in 1976, Long spent her early years moving around with her father, who helped build hydropower stations. Before her first birthday, she left her hometown with her family for the west of Central China's Hunan province. In the following years, the family traveled between the countryside and cities, the two different worlds in her eyes where people spoke two languages and lived completely different lifestyles.

Scenes of wharves, stations, streets, hotels, coaches and trains filled her memories. Although at that time the family was poor and travels were a toil, Long says she experienced more fun, beauty and innocence, especially when schools and parents did not demand that she study hard, allowing her to spend time playing with friends on mountains and in rivers, hiking or conceiving pranks.

However, she also has a clear memory from when she was 4 years old of a flood washing away their home, and at 6, witnessing a big fire as if half of the sky was burning. Her deepest memory about life when she was 8 years old was the fear of seeing "small figures" after dark and the family's constant moving.

Her early life experience and such memories surely exerted an influence on the creation of her fairy stories, she says.

"Since childhood, I have had a lot of questions about the world and loved everything around me. The arduous travels somehow gave me a tender heart with much sympathy and compassion," she says.

Good with words, Long aspired to become a writer after graduation from junior middle school. She did not start creating fairy stories until 2008, when she was working on an adaptation of Peter Pan and she realized that she, too, could write fairy stories.

She often started writing a story without thinking too much about the outline and plot. For example, she created Zhouzhoubabade Chengshi because her 5-year-old nephew always laughed when he heard the word zhouzhoubaba (literally meaning "crumpled"). As she went on writing, more ideas came to her so that she would usually finish a story in one day and spend time revising it.

Apart from the tales, particularly impressive are the illustrations by Liaw.

In November 2020, Liaw attended the China International Children's Book Fair in Shanghai, a meeting place for illustrators and publishers. Liaw met editors from the Guangxi Normal University Press during the fair and introduced her work to them. Her style, combining collage, pastel and watercolor, impressed the editors.

After Long finished the tales in January last year, Liaw officially started her work last April. The biggest challenge was Shenme Yemeiyoude Gushi, she says.

"The editor and I had been thinking about how to draw the image of 'a story'; after all, it's not a concrete thing," Liaw says. "After studying a lot of other picture books, especially those about abstract ideas, we decided to represent 'a story' with the feeling of wind."

Commenting on Liaw's creation, the editor of the series Yang Yining says, "Fairy tales are among the most imaginative literary works. When reading fairy tales, every child has their own imagined scenes. As a result, when creating illustrations for fairy tales, artists should be able to apply colors and styles freely to convey the overall atmosphere and emotions of the stories, which will lead children into a 'feeling', rather than set scenes that will present children with fixed images. Monica's style meets this expectation."