Miss Alice

Author: Chen Bobu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-02-01
Features: The 21st century is the century of children. The world depicted in fairy tales is the world of children. Children have their own characteristics, such as innocence and purity, liveliness and activity, a love for fantasy, great curiosity, and strong imitative abilities, and so on. Mr. Chen Bobu devoted his energy to children's literature and the children, becoming a renowned children's literature writer and social activist. From the mid-1920s to the 1990s, he diligently wrote for nearly 70 years, producing millions of words of works. In 1981, he established the "Chen Bobu Children's Literature Award" to encourage and support younger writers, leaving an immortal legacy for the maturation and development of children's literature, especially fairy tales, in China.
Chen Bobu began writing fairy tales "while almost entirely influenced by myths and legends, fables, and fairy tales from Western literature" (as noted in the postscript to Miss Alice). Even as a primary school student, he occasionally borrowed a translated fairy tale titled The Cat Kingdom from a classmate, followed by The Cave of Strange Stones. The titles alone deeply captivated his curiosity as a child. Subsequently, works such as The Water Child, The King of the Golden River, The Adventures of Pinocchio, The Happy Prince, and The Blue Bird all had a profound impact on his creative life. The Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by British writer Lewis Carroll, with its fantastical imagination and vivid imagery, directly inspired him to create a "Chinese Alice." After much deliberation, he began writing in the spring of 1931 and finally completed the middle-grade fairy tale Miss Alice (published as a standalone book in January 1933), which received immense acclaim. Soon after, The Young Master was introduced to readers. These two works firmly established his significant position in the field of fairy tale creation.
By the 1980s, Chen Bobu remained undiminished in his talent. As he himself put it, "carefully picking up a pen that weighed a thousand pounds," he produced renowned works such as The Camel's Quest for Treasure, The Night Journey of Angel, and The Festival of Fairyland, providing young readers with even richer and more nourishing spiritual sustenance.