Kampung Boy

Kampung Boy was a great book to read to learn about the culture in Malaysia. The fact that it is a story that someone wrote of their own experiences growing up there really helps to authenticate the experiences that are illustrated in the book. Reading about Malaysian culture on the internet like I did for my last blog does not even come close to exemplifying the actual way people live, the way a real-life story does.  Reading Lat’s story in the form of a graphic novel really helped to give me an understanding of the story he was portraying.  Although the words were helpful and important in this book, it’s like the saying says, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this book had many pictures.  

When reading Kampung Boy it was easy for me to see the differences between our cultures, but looking back there were also some similarities. I think I did not notice the similarities at first because it something is the same as my own culture I do not think anything of it because it is “normal”. For example, I noted that the circumcision ritual that Lat undergoes in his tenth year as being very different than what we do in America. I did not notice that Lat was adventurous and did things that he should not as a teenager. This is the same in American culture, but I did not even notice because I saw that as normal.  Also, Lat’s family wanted him to do well in his studies, but he did not take them seriously at first. When he finally listened to his family and started studying, he passed an important examination and was admitted to an impressive boarding school in the capitol. This also reminds me of American culture because we always study hard to be able to get in to colleges and move away from home.

When doing some more research on Kampung Boy, I discovered a couple of facts that interested me about this book. First, Lat wrote this book to remind himself, and many others of their lives in the Kampung. He, like many others was living in the city and wanted to refresh his memory of his roots.  Kampung Boy was such a hit that it was adapted into a cartoon series. The show aired in 1999, and was made up of 26 episodes.

Kampung Boy did not undergo very many changes to be published in the United States. There were page numbers added in a font based off of Lat’s handwriting. The language was also adapted from British English to American English. There are some Malaysian words that have been left in the book, but they are easy to figure out using the context clues of surrounding words and the pictures.