Diversity in kids’ books is not a ‘woke agenda’. And there certainly isn’t too much of it
For the last two years, my friend the artist Sher Rill Ng and I have been giving readings and illustration workshops at the Robinson’s Bookshop in the Glen. Last Christmas, this bookshop stocked the most copies of our latest children’s book, Millie Mak the Maker. “These are just going to fly off the shelves,” one bookseller said warmly, pointing to the mountainous stack she wanted us to sign. Glen Waverley is a highly-educated, affluent and diverse suburb; 63% of its residents speak a language other than English at home.
Our books sell well. And from a superficial glance at our names, our books are also the sort Robinson’s owner Susanne Horman might classify as the kind of “diversity and inclusion” titles she wants to stop stocking. Her own bookshop chain apologised on Monday after Horman called for more picture books with “just white kids on the cover” and “traditional nuclear white family stories” on social media, claiming her comments were “taken out of context”.
Sher Rill is Chinese-Malaysian and I am Chinese-Cambodian. We created the Millie Mak series to reflect the reality of children’s experiences in Australia today. Millie’s mum is an aged care worker, her dad a food delivery driver. She lives with her parents and Chinese grandma. Her other grandparents are Scottish, but her superpower isn’t that she’s “diverse”. It’s that she can work wonders with a needle and thread, turning discarded items like tea-towels into skirts, cushion covers into bags and bed sheets into headbands.
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We know people judge books by their cover. That’s why Sher Rill and I laboured over every single detail of Millie – from the colour of her hair to what she should call her grandmother. We knew, at a deep and wounding level, that people with subconscious biases (and outright racists) would not buy the book if they had preconceived ideas about what the cover represented. So Sher Rill worked her magic: Millie’s hair is dark in the illustrations inside the book, but deep red on the cover – two realistic genetic possibilities.
The fact that we, two established creators, have to carefully calibrate these considerations each time we produce a book shows you how deep these unconscious prejudices are. Our publishers have never pushed us to make these changes, but Sher Rill and I want our stories to reach children far and wide. We write for children, not adults – but we need adults to buy our books, and the people who buy our books are predominantly middleclass. They want their children and grandchildren to be edified by good literature. Sometimes they believe they can teach their children about kindness and love through a book that has those words on the cover, featuring nice white kids and white rabbits.
So every time one of our books reaches the hands of any child, we rejoice because children don’t care about “the woke agenda”, as Horman described it, only about compelling stories. They love Millie Mak. It gives them a glimpse into the life of an Australian child who lives in commission housing, and the home of a Sikh family doctor. By the end, they want to sew a teatowel skirt.
People with imaginative empathy don’t judge a book by its cover. A good story transcends culture and taps into our most elemental feelings. Sher Rill’s book, Our Little Inventor, is set in a Victorian-era steampunk fantasy Melbourne and follows a determined girl fighting a man-made disaster. Our book Be Careful, Xiao Xin is about a little boy searching for independence, railing against his family’s overprotectiveness.
We’ve had readers tell us that Xiao Xin is their wilful blonde five-year old son, or that his father is their Chinese dad, or that his grandma is their Holocaustsurviving grandparent. The cultural details in our stories relate to some, but the overall stories are universal.
The standard, well-intentioned didactic depictions of minorities Sher Rill and I encountered in our childhoods were slit-eyed sidekicks or doeeyed shoeless victims of war and colonisation. Now that we have voices as writers and illustrators, we just want Australian children to see other Australian children as real human beings, not tropes or lessons.
Children read to expand the parameters of their universe. Just this week, my children read Bubbie & Rivka’s Best Ever Challah by Sarah Lynne Reul, Stars in Their Eyes by Jessica Walton and Aśka, and Shuna’s Journey by Hayao Miyazaki. These are books they chose, because the creators of these stories understood familial love, burgeoning romance and courage against adversity.
Why is it that authors like Hazel Edwards, Craig Silvey and Trent Dalton are lauded for books that feature “diverse” voices, but when real diverse authors write them, our stories are considered “woke” dreck? How insulting and myopic to believe that white creators always create the better, more enlightening books while the rest of us have an “agenda”. If anyone has an agenda, it’s the people who want to ban or limit children’s access to books.
Alice Pung is the author of many books, including the bestseller Laurinda.