GAH-NING TANG, 40
Where Is Gah-Ning? (1994)
Gah-Ning Tang, who met Munsch in 1991, inspired Where Is Gah-Ning?, in which an adventure-seeking eight-yearold girl hatches a plan to escape her small town and set out for the bright lights of Kapuskasing, Ont.
I GREW UP IN HEARST, ONT., a town in northern Ontario with a population of about 5,000. It was such a small town that we didn’t have a movie theatre or a McDonald’s. When I was a kid, I would always be excited to go with my cousins to Kapuskasing, 100 km from Hearst, for a movie and Chicken McNuggets because I didn’t want to be in town at our family restaurant. My uncle King owned King’s Cafe, which was one of only two Chinese restaurants in Hearst at the time, for 46 years.
I wrote about that in my first letter to Bob in 1989. I drew a picture of me in a hot-air balloon that I vaguely remember being pink and red. He wrote Where is GahNing? based on that picture, but he changed the hot-air balloon to 300 balloons. In the book, my parents went searching for me after I went to Kapuskasing. Part of the joke in the title was that as a child, I was always curled up and tucked away in a corner somewhere, and my mom was constantly looking for me.
I wrote him letters nearly every two weeks as a child. Most of them were written on the back of the paper placemats that our restaurant used. They weren’t the new ones, either. They were the slightly used ones that came back from the tables, which my mom would tell me to use. They were blank on one side and had pink and red advertisements for local businesses printed on the other side. I wrote to Bob about my dreams of becoming an illustrator, and later a writer; he wrote back encouraging me to pursue my dreams.
The first time I met Bob, I was 10 years old. I had been writing to him for two years. Bob was known for dropping in unannounced on schools when he travelled for shows, and that year he decided to come and visit my school. I was called out to the staff room where Robert Munsch was waiting. I was surprised but also very shy. The next thing I knew, I was spending the whole day with him. I was hanging out with him in the gym and the library in between his storytelling sessions in the school. I don’t remember what we talked about. I probably just rambled.
As I got older, I would write to him about the stories I was working on. Over 32 years of letter writing, we started calling each other family. I actually write the letters to Uncle Bob and Aunt Ann, Munsch’s wife. Lately, I’ve been writing to Bob more because of the dementia diagnosis. Ann let me know that it makes him feel better. Sometimes I forget he’s this larger-than-life storyteller. To me, he’s just Bob.