Day +122

I am fine today. Let me continue the story about story books.

When I was studying in primary five, someone lent me three of the Four Great Classical Novels (四大名著): Water Margin (水浒传), Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义) and Journey to the West(西游记). Another one called Dream of the Red Chamber(红楼梦) was too difficult for me to understand, so I did not read it. I was addicted in reading these novels. I remembered I always started reading the novel inside my house until it was too dark for me to see the words in the evening. Then I moved out from the house and continued reading it at the staircase outside because it was brighter there. After I could not see the words outside the house, I turned back to light up the kerosene lamp and continue reading. These books kept me busy for quite some time, so that I did not have to beg my cousin for story books.

At that time, I did not know how to use a Chinese dictionary to check the pronunciation of words. We were using Traditional Chinese ZhuYin(Bopomofo) phonetic system instead of HanYu PinYin as we use today. Unfortunately, the teacher did not teach the ZhuYin in school, so even though I managed to find the word in the dictionary, I would not know how to pronounce it. In the end, I just guess the pronunciation (有边读边，没边读中间). This is why my Chinese pronunciation is still so lousy today (一塌糊涂) :-(

Anyway, it is not fair to compare my situation with what my children have today. And there is no point for me to explain to them the difficulty that I experienced in getting story books to read and how much interest I had in reading when I was young. Nowadays, they enjoyed all sort of entertainments such as television and computer games, which are definitely more interesting than reading. Who knows if I was also given these attractive entertainments, I was still interested in reading?

See you next post :-)