Old stories for new readers

Growing up, Taiwanese kids hear about Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, the Monkey King and plenty of other fairy tales and myths, but none of these stories are rooted in Taiwan. A new album by Wind Records (風潮唱片) called Vu Vu's Tales (Vu Vu 的故事), though, hopes to change that.

Vu Vu is the Pingpu tribe's word for ancestor and the tale that is narrated to a modern-day Pingpu child tells of a Dutch merchant who came to Formosa many centuries ago and visited 10 of the island's tribes. At each settlement, the tribe's members share with their foreign guest one of their myths that reveals the unique culture of each tribal group.

Vu Vu's Tales was written and narrated by Sakinu, an Aboriginal author of children's books and junior high school textbooks on Aboriginal history who is also himself a descendent of Dutch merchants.

"All the stories are real Aboriginal myths that have been handed down through the millennia by oral tradition," said Jing Peng (彭靖), composer of the instrumental music that fills one of the CD's and of the music that accompanies the narration on the second CD.

The album is published in a hard-backed picture book the size of a regular CD case. Inside are 24 pages with illustrations of the myths and 50 more pages containing the full-length written versions of the myths that are narrated on the second CD for people to read along to. Sakinu recounts the story in slightly accented Mandarin and the accompanying text is printed in Mandarin, with bopomofo used in spots spell out terms in Aboriginal languages.

Vu Vu's Tales is Wind Records' first foray into children's music, having until now focused almost entirely on the publication of New Age, Taiwanese Aboriginal music and the traditional music of China's minority peoples.

But despite this, it's not much of a departure from the label's long-standing work in the preservation and promotion of local cultures.

In Taiwan, the turn to material intended for children carries with it the weight of politics surrounding the localization of children's education.

"It's not explicit, but there is an undeniable political side to this album in the way it takes a Taiwan-centered view in telling stories that can be used for children's education. Before, education was always China-centered, and that's only recently starting to change," Peng said. "This means that adults reading these stories to their children will probably be hearing them for the first time themselves." Sakinu's stories are idyllic and certainly do not contain the interplay of good and evil of many Western fairy tales.

For starters, the Aborigines seem to all eagerly embrace and welcome the Dutch traveler, who in the illustrations looks like Tintin with a pith helmet. There's also none of the war and savagery that characterized relations between the Aborigines and Han Chinese settlers, except for one passage in which the Chinese are carrying out slash-and-burn landscaping of Aborigines' sacred hunting grounds.

For the most part, the stories teach a small and idealized portion of the cosmology or moral foundations of the Tao, Atayal, Rukai, Amis, Bunun, Saisiat, Pingpu, Paiwan, Puyuma and Tsou tribes. They also manage to avoid becoming overly didactic or riddled with the stereotypes typically thrust upon Aborigines, though there is the occasional appearance of a drunk tribesman and the spontaneous burst into song and dance.