help them to understand what was happening around them and to create a positive self-
image.
Local publishers, however, needed a lot of encouragement to bring about this vision.
There was a tendency to translate English children’s books, with unsatisfactory results.
For example Enid Blyton’s books about the Famous Five were translated and
Malaysianised to the extent of changing the names of the characters, but the cultural
setting was untouched so that Mohammed, Ibrahim and Fatimah, apparently good
Muslims, were described as eating bacon and eggs for breakfast!
However, there were some good examples of enterprise. For example, an attractive,
full-colour picture book, Burung Bermata Satu [The Bird Hunter] (1972) an Indonesian
folk-tale, was published in both English and Malay. Despite a high literacy rate,
Malaysia is not really a reading society, and it faces problems in that there is an
overemphasis on textbook learning and a lack of book distribution networks in rural
areas.
SingaporeSingapore is an island republic with an ethnically diverse population made up of
Chinese (76 per cent), Malays (15 per cent), Indians (7 per cent) and Eurasians and
other minorities (2 per cent). Nearly a quarter of the population is under 15-years-old.
There are relatively high levels of prosperity and literacy. English is the language of
administration, but Chinese, Malay and Tamil are also recognised as official languages.
Locally produced children’s books have a very low profile. Many books are imported; in
Chinese from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China; in Tamil from South India; in Malay from
Malaysia and in English from Britain and the USA, and these are easily available in
bookshops and public libraries. While easy access to imported books does not help the
situation, the lack of indigenous publishing is also due to the small, multilingual
population and the fact that parents are mostly interested in buying books which have
an obvious educational value. The standards of the children’s books published in
Singapore are generally low, both in the matter of content and in appearance.
The major exception to this observation is children’s books in Chinese. Singapore
participates in the Asian Co-Publication Programme and English texts have been
translated into Chinese. The Moongate Collection, picture books in the Chinese
language and based on folk-tales, was launched in 1972. Books in this series have
attractive, high quality formats and lay-out, and make good use of colour. The White
Elephant, an adaptation of a Burmese folk-tale, received honourable mention at the
Biennale Illustratione Bratislava in 1973. In 1974, Xie Gei Hai Zi Men De Shi [Poems for
Children] by Chew Kok Chan, a collection of poems in Chinese, mostly about the sights
and sounds of Singapore, and illustrated in colour, won the National Book Development
Council of Singapore’s National Book Award for Children’s Books in Chinese. Tian Luo Zi
[The Fairy Snail] (1979) is one of a number of Asian folk-tales retold by Huang Yue Zhu
(Olive Lee) in Chinese and subsequently translated into English and Malay.
Four generations of Singaporeans have enjoyed Enid Blyton’s books and local writers
have been inspired to produce similar stories just because they are so popular. Pipi
Kirinya Bercalar [The Scar on the Left Cheek] (1974), written in Malay by Muhammed
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