Young Generation Magazine (YG)

I remember that during my primary school days (1975 to 1980), we have a number of children publications that were being promoted in school : Young Singaporean, Yippee, Young Generation, Zoo-Ed，“好学生”，“知识报” and “知识画报”. My eldest brother used to buy the Young Singaporean magazine, which cost 20 cents per copy. One of the features in this magazine which caught my attention was the comic story on Quyuan (屈原), the patriotic poet of Chu, who lived during the late Warring States period in China. It was fully colour illustrated, with captions in both English and Chinese. However, they stopped publishing this magazine in 1980, and was replaced by a new magazine called Young Generation. I was already in primary six, and was determined to collect every issue of this new magazine to continue following the story of Quyuan. The magazine shown here is the inaugural issue, and the cover story is the classic “孟母三迁”，which was depicted through a fully coloured comic strip in the magazine. According to the Editorial, the new magazine "combines the best features of the very successful and popular magazines, the Young Singaporean and the Jolly Generation." This explains the title of the new magazine, which took the first and last name of its two predecessors. It also stated that "Young Generation is a fortnightly magazine that will meet the needs of children who are growing up in the 1980s" and that "in line with the Singapore education policy, this new magazine will be published in three languages, Chinese, English and Malay". Some stories, like "Brain Power", was written in both English and Chinese side-by-side, which I think are helpful to students who wanted to learn and master both languages. Of course, it also has my favourite Quyuan comic. Then it has an article on Tanjung Katong, written in Malay. The trilingual features in the magazine really reflected our multi-racial culture and heritage. I understand that YG is still in publication, and am amazed that it has been around for the last 30 over years. I hope it will continue to meet the needs of children growing up in Singapore in the 21st century.