A forever story

Author's fairy tales provide readers, not all young, with a world of imagination and memorable characters, Yang Yang reports.

This is a story about, ahem, a story. Like all good fairy tales it begins with the tried and trusted OUAT: Once upon a time, here goes, there was a story from the Kingdom of Stories. When it was born, it was only a small dot, without name or content, or anything. So opens the fairy tale Shenme Yemeiyoude Gushi (A Story That Has Nothing) by Long Xiangmei, winner of the Chen Bochui International Children's Literature Award in 2019.

It had ambitions. It aspired to become an eternal story that would live in people's heart forever. The story thus started traveling around hoping to "catch" some characters. As it went on, a lion, a rabbit, a girl and a grandmother accidentally entered the story one by one, but all left, for different reasons.

The dismayed story, like a character, traveled aimlessly in a snowy winter. It worried that it would soon disappear because nobody could remember it. But it had nothing really to fear. To its surprise, when Shenme ended, it was actually known by many children.