My bond with reading has always been dynamic, with valleys of indifference and peaks of passion as I grow up.
I was in third grade when I enjoyed reading for the first time. Back then, I was a mischievous boy living in China, and my life was filled with bike rides, spinning tops, video games, neighborhood cats, fights, and after school detentions. I never cared about books; in fact, I despised them, for only nerds read them. Contrary to my mischievous personality, my mother was a reader who lived on books when she was young. She loved novels and poetry – especially those of Rabindranath Tagore – so much that she aspired to be an author. Likely hoping that I may one day inherit some of her love of reading, she followed the recommendation of a friend and bought me a series of animal fictions written by Chinese author Shen Shixi.
Those books, however, were left unread for weeks – until I was forced to open one during school. But after flipping through a couple of pages, my eyes were glued. Shen Shixi’s stories depict the lives of wild animals; his narration was vivid, heart-touching, and sometimes very funny. From his stories, I experienced the joy of reading for the first time. I enjoyed it so much that I could read for hours. I began to read them at home, during class, and even during recess, giving up the precious time to play with friends. I bring a book everywhere I go and read whenever I have a chance, and within a year or two, I’ve exhausted every single book that Shen Shixi wrote.
Shen Shixi’s animal fictions, a gift from my mother, opened my eyes to the world of literature. After finishing all those books, I moved onto other great books like “Warriors” and “the Three-body problem”, which turned out to be my favorite; I immersed myself into those books, and I was fascinated by the ideas they offered.
However, my journey in Literatureland came to a surprise halt when, in the summer of fifth grade, my family moved to the U.S.
As an immigrant, learning English became my priority, so my parents and tutor had decided that I should abandon my Chinese books altogether and replace them with English books. Compared to the Chinese books that I could easily immerse myself in, reading in English was a torture. In sixth grade, I could still sneak in some time to read Chinese fictions because EL English was an easy class. From seventh grade, however, I was moved to regular English, sitting in the same class with native speakers. Our teachers started to assign books – books of hundreds of pages filled with foreign letters. Reading became a pain as I struggled through pages after pages. Over time, as my English books became harder and harder, and as we began to write about themes, my interest in literature diminished, I started to play video games, I discovered SparkNotes, and I began to avoid reading altogether.
It was my father who inspired me to pick up a book again. But this time, the books were no longer fiction, but rather non-fictions.
“If a book stood the test of time,” my father told me on a walk, “it must carry extraordinary ideas that are beyond the minds of people in the time period from which it was written.” My father views reading as a process of inner growth; he believes that through learning the thoughts of great people in the past, one could accumulate oneself with the wisdom necessary to see and tackle problems one may encounter in the future.
Inspired by my father, I started to read for my personal growth. Though Dad recommended autobiographies, philosophies, and religious texts, I found self-help books more engaging and straight to the point. As I read more frequently, reading in English no longer felt like a pain. As I read in search of wisdom, I began to enjoy the process once again.
Nowadays, amongst my increasingly demanding high school life and the distractions from technology, I still make conscious efforts to read everyday. But the meaning of reading has changed. Books are no longer a source of pure joy; it has become a source of enlightenment.