From The New York Times:
Here is a red dinosaur that demands our attention. The cartoon character, named Gogo, bounces on a monitor inside China’s largest bookstore. “Do you like doughnuts? Do you like burgers? Do you like sandwiches?” he sings in English.
“Yes I do!” the subtitles prompt. But the audience misses its cue. Look at them ignoring Gogo: a seated bundle of green hand-knit sweaters, black pigtails and bowed heads . . . reading. They’re poring over cartoons — translations of “Calvin and Hobbes” and of Japanese manga — and the locally drawn “Legend of Nezha” books, which held 10 of the top 11 places on a Chinese best-seller list last year. Others turn the pages of a Garfield English-Chinese dictionary, which contains no entry for lasagna, but one for tofu.
Forty focused children crouch on Book City’s fourth floor, and 40 more gather at the neighboring nook, and 40 after that. It’s calming to reach this pool of prepubescence amid the chaos that is Book City, whose five floors hold 230,000 titles.
