The Flight and a Spotlight on Southeast Asian Children’s Literature

The Flight and a Spotlight on Southeast Asian Children’s Literature Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang (bio) As I write these words, all the articles for my first Bookbird issues are finally compiled and ready for the next step in the process. My mind starts wandering back to my first working day as a junior journalist, when a senior recounted his struggle with design and layout problems. Just an hour before he needed to send everything to the printer, he discovered a glaring empty space in one of the pages. It was just enough for one paragraph, nothing more. In a state of desperation, he considered scanning his left sandal and using the image to fill that gap. Our mind surely works in peculiar ways; almost twenty years later, this supposedly funny story comes back to haunt me in my new capacity as an editor. I sigh in relief as I turn my gaze upon my computer and the opened e-mail client there. There lie a lot of e-mail exchanges, full of support and advice from people who have been caringly involved with the journal. I am not sure I want to count the number of e-mails I have sent to the previous editors, Petros Panaou and Janelle Mathis. I would like to thank them for their invaluable mentorship and the work they have put into making Bookbird soar ever higher in the last four years. I am also thankful for the help of Björn Sundmark—Bookbird editor from 2015 to 2018—who sits next to me at work. While my questions do not add to the daunting number of e-mails, he is always ready to support my Bookbird-related queries every time I knock at his office door. The president of Bookbird Inc., Valerie Coghlan, has also stood by me throughout the whole transition year, and her advice is nothing but invaluable. This issue’s cover illustration, from Var är min syster? by Sven Nordqvist, best summarizes the editorial expectation for this issue. Just as the unnamed protagonist begins to soar high and explore the big, exciting world full of wonder, I hope to continue the legacy left by Petros, Janelle, and all the editors who preceded them. In this issue, I would like to offer a spotlight on Southeast Asia and the development of children’s literature in the region, alongside other international articles that communicate multiple perspectives on issues we all care about. In the first article from the issue’s spotlight, “Philippine Children’s Stories as Protest: A Cognitive Stylistics Approach,” Lalaine F. Yanilla Aquino explores how five Filipino children’s books from the last seven years present a tumultuous political situation to children. This discussion of sociopolitical protest and movement within children’s literature is continued by Herdiana Hakim as she examines a picturebook about the 1998 [End Page 1] Indonesian reform movement in her article, “M Is for Movement: Innosanto Nagara’s Political Children’s Text as a Space for Critical Consciousness.” The third article, “‘And Now This Story Is Ours’: Fairy Tale and Collage in Trung Le Nguyen’s The Magic Fish” by Barbara Tannert-Smith, takes a different perspective by focusing on the intergenerational communication struggle of second-generation Vietnamese immigrants in America as well as identity and sexuality. In this unthemed issue, there are also articles covering other points of interest. A study of metamodernism and micropower is found in “Metamodern Engagement and Micropower in Lissa Evans’s Wed Wabbit” by Nurul Fateha. Offering a fresh take on the study of the representation of poverty in children’s literature from an East Asian perspective, Shih-Wen Sue Chen examines three Taiwanese picturebooks in “Economic Hardship in Taiwanese Picturebooks.” Meanwhile, from the Mediterranean region, Chryssa Kouraki and Vicky Patsiou present their study of otherness and migration in “The Image of ‘Foreigner’ in George Sari’s Autobiographical Fictional Characters.” In the Children and Their Books section, readers can follow Wigati Yektiningtyas and James Modouw’s effort to engage Papuan children in the easternmost part of Indonesia to read and increase their literacy. In the Letters section, Moisés Selfa Sastre and Enric Falguera Garcia introduce Núria Albertí and...