Pippi Longstocking: a global gift to children

Who is the strongest, brightest and richest girl in the world? Pippi Longstocking, of course, a fictional character created by renowned Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren.

The 9-year-old girl, who lives alone with a monkey and a horse in a ramshackle house, can lift a horse with one hand and has a trunk full of gold.

Pippi brings adventure, excitement and a hint of revolt into the often mundane daily life of well-behaved children.

She defends and protects her friends when they are in danger; takes them on wonderful and scary adventures in the back yard or the South Seas and puts on shows for them to keep them entertained.

Quite opposite to an ideal girl of the time she was created, Pippi is anything but beautiful with red braids that stick straight out, a potato nose and freckles.

She is unkempt and wears clothes that neither match nor fit. Worse still, she lacks manners. She is loud and assertive - she knows what she wants.

With almost no schooling, the wild redhead defies and mocks conventions and authority and can outsmart any adult.

Pippi Longstocking took readers by storm and caused quite a stir among critics when first published in 1945.

Parent organizations and educators were quick to condemn it while proponents relished its revolutionary spirit.

Concerns that Pippi's defiance of conventions might challenge established educational values sparkled hot discussion at a press conference for a musical adaptation of the children's story.

The debate came as the musical Pippi Longstocking, jointly produced by Chinese and Swedish teams, ready for its opening curtain at the Beijing's China Children's Art Theater (CCAT) last year, an event to celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of Astrid Lindgren.

Despite her naughtiness, Pippi is kind, generous and brave, always ready to offer help to those in need, says Staffan Gotestam, Swedish director of the musical, who has staged the musical seven times.

Since the birth of her character, Pippi has long been enjoyed popularity with children around the world, Gotestam says. It has become a seminal work in children's literature, translated into some 90 languages.

The Pippi story is full of playfulness, which helps release children's inherent potential, says Zhou Yuyuan, CCAT president.

The family musical brought a whirlwind of joy to the Chinese audience of children and their parents, allowing them to share Pippi's impishness, goodness and sincerity, Zhou says.

In spite of her extraordinary strength, she never abuses her power and sees to it that nobody else does either. She has a well-honed sense of justice and fair play.

In some sense, the fictional heroin has helped throw off psychological shackles of women's social role imposed by costumes.

Feminists who grew up with Pippi Longstocking on their bookshelves recall how this reading experience changed them forever.

The familiar figure became a new role model and a cradle for female assertiveness.

With Pippi around, the world becomes a stage and a playground, and life becomes a big adventure.

Pippi Longstocking, one of the world's best bedtime stories, was created in the 1940s when new ideas about child education and psychology emerged.

Lindgren participated in the then-heated public debate as a proponent of child-centered education that focuses on respect for children that recognizes their thoughts and feelings.

It is reflected in Lindgren's writing. However she tells the tale, she always thinks of her primary audience and uses child-oriented writing. She offers a world close to nature and full of simple joys, an innocence lost by many in the industrial age.

Fairly early in her career, Lindgren received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, considered the Nobel Prize for children's literature.

In addition to many prizes for children's writing, Lindgren received a number of awards for adult fiction, including the Danish Academy's Karen Blixen Medal, Russia's Leo Tolstoy Medal and Chile's Gabriela Mistral Prize.

Lindgren's gift for storytelling is only part of the picture. Both in her life and in her fiction, she consistently sided with the powerless and abused, be they children, adults or animals.

The 1978 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the 1989 Albert Schweitzer Medal, awarded by the animal Welfare Institute of the United States recognized her humanitarian and compassionate accomplishments.

Two prizes have been established in her name - the Astrid Lindgren Prize established by the publishers Raben & Sjogren on the occasion of her 60th birthday in 1967 and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award created by the Swedish government after her death in 2002.

Swedish Embassy in China and Swedish Institute

(China Daily 04/14/2008 page15)