Long-term readers of this blog may remember that, not long after I’d first started at Chetham’s, I was asked to contribute to the school’s Chinese New Year celebrations online (the school being mostly locked down due to Covid). At the time, I was mildly surprised by the discrepancy between the proportion of Chinese students in the school and the comparatively low number of fiction books set in China or featuring Chinese protagonists.
Zoom forwards five years, and this past January, the school celebrated the culmination of a year-long project to install a Chinese Reading Corner in the school library.
The Chinese Music Classroom (CMC) is a collaboration between Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. In September 2024, I was approached by our Music Principal, Tom Redmond, about a donation of roughly a hundred books to the school library through the CMC collaboration.
At the time, I knew no Chinese, and it was intimidating to approach cataloguing a hundred books in a foreign language. So, I went along to the Chinese classes that were offered to Chetham’s staff by the Chinese Director of the CMC, Sophia Kuai. It’s a happy coincidence that these classes are held at the same time as the Lower School’s Lunchtime Concerts. This meant that the only students using the library would be Y9 and above, allowing me to feel more comfortable ‘abandoning’ the library for one of its busier hours!
Sophia was managing the Beijing side of the donation itself, so it was also helpful to know her better through the classes, even before the boxes arrived. Attending the classes, alongside signing up for Duolingo, proved to be invaluable in helping the project to even approach feasibility.
Finally, during the Spring Term 2025, Sophia and I got the chance to properly look through a few of the large donation boxes together. This was the first point that I was able to see what had been donated. What had been initially pitched to me as a hundred items had grown to around two hundred, and some of the donations were not library books at all (including pens, ink, drawing paper, decorations, sports rackets and even a VR Headset)!
But after some investigation we came up with the following list of library suitable items:
- Picture books with Chinese and English text.
- Books about Chinese culture (including medicine, music and travel).
- Calligraphy books with brushstroke templates.
- Chinese masterpieces, in English.
- Books for learning Chinese (including textbooks and early reader books).
- Books for teaching Chinese (pedagogy).
We also discussed what Sophia was hoping for from the collection and whether it worked better as its own separate area or to integrate it with the existing library stock. With Tom’s input, we decided that creating a new Chinese Reading Corner would be the way to go.
The Creation of the Reading Corner
After deciding to create a discrete section for the donated books, I rearranged our reference area to clear space for the incoming Chinese Reading Corner. I contacted the Head of the Modern Languages department, Nina Geschwendt, who very kindly accepted a large offering of surplus French and German dictionaries. After that, the bulk of the remaining books were reshelved to create a music reference section within the Music Library. What was previously a full reference section was now a Dictionaries section, and four empty shelves for what would become the Chinese Reading Corner.
With the space cleared, I emailed to say we were ready for the books to be brought over – not realising that I would be brought all six boxes whether they contained books or not! The wonderful evening library assistant, Charlotte Stoddard-Stevenson, went through and sorted the boxes into categories, which we then used as the basis for our final arrangement on the shelves.
Although the final layout ended up following a genrefication approach, rather than the Dewey classification I had initially planned to use, this was not a huge departure for our current library practice. Most of the music collection is arranged by type rather than classification: String Quartets, Wind + Quintets, Brass Nonets/Dectets, Larger Ensembles, Orchestral Sets, Piano Music, Miniature Scores, etc.
Our final categories for the Chinese Reading Corner were:
- Early Chinese Readers
- Full Chinese Readers
- Chinese Music
- Chinese Picture Books
- Chinese Culture
- Chinese Classics
- Chinese Language
with a few split categories on the shelves themselves for ease of use.
While the evening library staff and Duke of Edinburgh volunteers were able to help with the book labelling, covering and processing of the items (a huge task already), it was my sole responsibility to catalogue the items digitally.
As with all items in the school library, it was very important to me that all catalogue users could immediately understand the record they were looking at without needing to go examine the physical item. This was even more important for items in a foreign language.
While by this point (Summer 2025) I had been learning Chinese for almost a year, I was still a hopeless novice! I had to rely heavily on translation tools, and I also sometimes took questions to Sophia in the Chinese classes.
For example, some of the Full Chinese Readers (for older or more fluent students) had texts spanning three volumes, but Google Translate gave me the translations: upper, middle and lower. How was I to tell which meant volume 1?
Sophia told me that upper (shàng) meant Volume One and, when I found that counterintuitive, she even drew me a diagram to explain why. But please don’t ask me to replicate her explanation!
Another difficulty I encountered was safeguarding items that I couldn’t read. In hindsight, I had started my cataloguing in the hardest place, with the Full Chinese Readers. These books were entirely in Chinese, with no English translation.
One particular book gave me pause due to the images inside being potentially frightening for younger students. When I used Google translate to look over the first chapter, the text included gruesome illness, poverty deaths, a child’s coffin and possibly a racial slur. According to Wikipedia, the protagonist is also beaten by his uncle later in the book. The clunky translation changed depending on the angle I held my phone at, which didn’t help parse the actual context of the writing, in the way a language I was more familiar with might have allowed.
Certainly, texts for older students can include difficult subject matter and even some inappropriate language. To Kill A Mockingbird (which I studied at school in Higher English) has racial slurs and 1984, studied at Chetham’s in the English A-Level, has an entire sequence where the main character is tortured. My worry here was that we have Chinese-speaking children in the school as young as eight years old, so I needed to be careful that any books within the Chinese Corner would not be unsuitable for them to pick up and browse without the staff realising what they were accessing.
Because I was so unfamiliar with the language, I felt unplaced to make the appropriateness call myself, so my solution was to keep that particular book in the back office rather than on the shelves. It is available if explicitly requested, but there is no danger of younger or more sensitive students accidentally accessing something that might be upsetting.
After the Full Chinese Readers were completed, the rest of the books were actually considerably easier to catalogue. From a safeguarding perspective, many were geared towards younger readers, and with others, such as the Chinese Music, it was clear what their contents were about. Some of the books I liked most (from a cataloguer and a school librarian perspective) were the ones that had side-by-side Chinese and English.
For fun, I tried reading one of the early reader texts: The Little Mouse by Lucy Wang. After a year of studying the language, this 28-page story, about a little mouse (lǎoshǔ) who ate so many meatballs (ròuwán) he looked like a pokeball (Pokeball), was surprisingly accessible, and rather cute!
The materials were brought over in April, and the full collection was completed (sorting, processing, cataloguing and all) by the October half term break. The project was put on hold for June, July and August due to end-of-term commitments and the library being closed over the school’s Summer Holiday. So, it effectively only took me and Charlotte about six months to complete the bulk of the work. Alongside running everything else in the library too, that’s something we can be very proud of.
The Grand Opening
The Reading Corner’s Grand Opening event was fantastic. Two of our Duke of Edinburgh volunteers created posters for Chinese New Year, and the CMC donated a beautiful glass plaque for the Reading Corner. The three staff members from the Chinese Music Classroom set up a traditional Chinese bookmark craft station on our large table, with stickers and paints and ribbons and Chinese characters.
Donated to Chetham’s School of Music Library by the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing
That break and lunchtime, students came in droves to participate. Although I had to split my focus between helping students at the library desk and the event itself, the three CMC teachers ensured the area was supervised the whole time. (Which was particularly important for keeping the energy high and the paints on the paper!)
A group of about eight juniors kicked it off, and then other students and staff took part as well. A couple of Y13 students, who had been intrigued at morning break, returned that lunchtime to ask whether it was just a Lower School event – and were delighted to be told they could join in too!
It was also interesting to chat to some Y9s, who I had taught Literacy to when they were in Y7, about all the languages they spoke. One little girl told me that she spoke Cantonese and Spanish at home, alongside knowing English and Mandarin from living in England and China, and now she was also learning French and German in school. And – on top of that – she reads music!
I even got to know the Chinese teachers better. I knew Sophia, of course, from the Chinese classes, but I hadn’t really spoken to either of the other two. One of them mentioned that, while the others came from Beijing, she was from a small town in China. Sophia hastened to let me know (so I didn’t get the wrong idea) that the “small town” was actually a little larger than Manchester!
Projects like this can fly under the radar once they are complete. The year of learning a foreign language, planning, cataloguing, processing, agonising(!) disappears into the shelves and looks like it has always been there. So, it was really gratifying that the final Grand Opening was such an engaging event, and it looked great on social media.
While framing the project through only the final event risks reducing over a year’s work into a single activity day, the effects of the project will hopefully have a long-lasting positive impact in the school library. Already, Chinese students and some students who are learning it in the school, are excited to have a bookshelf of brand-new books in their language.
As an example, even before the Grand Opening, one of the Y7 Literacy students pleaded with me to let her take out the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Although I was initially reluctant (I hadn’t yet added its record), I relented and created a quick placeholder record that I completed when she returned the book!
Beyond this, the Reading Corner can serve as a future template to upgrade the rest of the language areas of the school library. I’d love to just dive in with an entirely similar scale project for the French and German materials, but unless Chetham’s wants to twin with a Francophone or Germanic donor, we’ll need to be a little more realistic. That being said, while the process will take longer due to budgeting restrictions, I’ve made a start by ordering the French text versions of some popular kids’ novels, in imitation of the Full Chinese Reader section of the Chinese Reading Corner.
And just this past week, I was told that the school is planning to use the library classroom for some of the Chinese lessons. Having the Chinese Reading Corner just outside the door feels almost perfect.
Kirsty's Keyboard 