几米is a Taiwanese illustrator who illustrates children’s books. He started off in the advertising industry as a graphic designer/art director. In his book “when the story was young” he talks about his experiences with leukemia and the reasons why he started writing children’s books. He started late at the age of 40 and it was only after he had recovered from being bed ridden with leukemia that he started publishing his works. He also talks about his line of thoughts and his inspirations for his works in this book. I would be choosing two of his works to talk about today, but I really recommend checking out his other works as well since this just the tip of the iceberg. ( The pictures of the books I’m showing would be in Chinese since it comes from my own collection, but he does have them in English as well.)
The Moon Forgets is one of the iconic works in his career as an illustrator, it is written with the intention of providing company and comfort to those who are feeling lonely. It talks about a boy’s journey with the real moon that has lost it’s memories. Each person interprets the book differently and the text differently. It holds different meanings for different people. Also, you really cannot just look at the words or just the pictures, they each have their own respective meanings and combines to become another.
This book is “for the children who grew up bravely.” His initial thought for this story was that he wanted to write a happy story for the moon because a friend pointed out that he kept writing about loneliness and sadness. Two experiences made him decide to make the theme more complicated. First is his past colleague from the advertising company had committed suicide, leaving his wife and child and the second is a friend who passed suddenly, similarly leaving his loved ones behind. He realised that he did not know how to comfort a child that has just lost his father thus including similar themes in the book, hoping to ease the pain of lonely children. He incorporated many themes in this book, single parents, daily life, a child’s short attention span and the story became an even sadder story.
How to Own a Corner is one of the first books I owned of his, I’ve heard of his books from my mom before, but never really touched them until I got into secondary school. Another good thing about his books is that adults can enjoy them as well. It is about a child that hides in the corner of the world when she feels like she is not being understood and feels lonely and she goes on an adventure in that small corner of the world. This book has phrases that I resonate with sometimes, realising that there’s always things that people would just not understand. Similar to The Moon Forgets, this is a story that everyone would have a different interpretation to it. It’s always fun to see different opinions on a book. The description at the back of the book says that I have a child in my heart that hides in the corner when she feels left out, there are puzzles for her to solve there and memories for her to fixate. Everytime she does that only for a little while, as she needs a bit of time to find her place in the world again.
What I really like about his illustrations is that at each stage of my life when I read his books there Seems to always be a new level of meaning that I would have missed out when I was younger. There are so many works of his that I have not read, but the ones I’ve read I have resonated and felt for. It is something that I strive to achieve, as in works that people can resonate with and understand.