By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer
I first met The Little Prince as a child, but it feels more accurate to say the book met — and saw — through me. It told me that imagination was not foolish, that love and grief were bound together, and that growing up doesn’t mean surrendering wonder. I wept when the Little Prince left, but I also learned that love lives on in the stars and memory.
That was the beginning of a lifelong love of children’s books. It returned when I needed it most, during my fourth year of undergrad, overwhelmed by deadlines and anxieties about my future. As a volunteer at a children’s literary festival in Hong Kong, I was tasked with accompanying authors to schools and one morning, I met Zeno.
I watched as he read his book, My Strange Shrinking Parents, to a room full of wide-eyed fourth graders. His voice was gentle but steady, and somewhere between his beautiful illustrations and the children’s wonder, I forgot I was supposed to be taking pictures and found myself blinking back tears instead.
Often, children’s books hold truths too large for us to grapple with otherwise. They talk about things many adults want to run away from. They make space for loss, joy, play, and transformation all at once. These books, and others like Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, continue to colour my world. They remind me not to trade magic for “matters of consequence,” and to keep looking up at the stars and hear them laugh back at me.
These books taught me how to sit with fear, how to forgive, and how to hope. Long before I knew the language of therapy or philosophy, I had these stories. And sometimes that’s still enough.
