When our sons, Zhiyan (age: 8) and Neysan (age: 4) were small, we started bringing them both to the community library, nearest to our residence in Singapore, one day of every weekend. The incentive was that they could both have lunch at the library’s cafe, which served French fries, sausage bread, heavily topped pizza, and sugary drinks! After lunch, we insisted that they return to the library and spent another couple of hours there before we made our way home.
More than 20 years later, whenever my elder son Zhiyan returns from New York, where he is working, to meet us in Singapore, where our younger son Neysan is working and where Mona and I would spend our Spring Festival vacation, he would still spend time, despite his short vacation, in the community library. The library cafe is still there, but he orders iced tea.
It is a habit worth inculcating in our children. During the initial weekends, they were quite happy picking up books to browse in the children’s section in the basement of the library building. Of course, this initial phase wore off fairly quickly! With the confidence gained from navigating the library with our assistance during those initial weekends, they were soon busy shuffling around the five floors of the library building. When their curiosity was sated, they both settled down for many enjoyable weekends in the comic section on the fourth floor of the library.
Of our five external sensory receptors, smell and taste are dominant for learning in our infant years. That is why our favourite foods, even at an advanced age, are most likely those delicious foods that our mothers served us when we were young. As we grew older, the other three external sensory organs of sight, hearing, and touch gradually took over in learning for the rest of our lives. Zhiyan learns visually; Neysan is an auditory learner. After a year or so at the community library, Zhiyan would be spending time at the main library shelves reading a book. Meanwhile, Neysan would be seen sitting down at the library computer station, listening to a story. It is interesting to note that Zhiyan would borrow five books from the library every weekend for reading at home, while Neysan would borrow none. This pattern is still repeated after twenty years!
Today, there are more shopping malls than there are community libraries, whether in Singapore or here in Haikou. Forget about all the other distractions; the temptation just in the food and beverage section of the shopping mall far exceeds that of the community library. If this habit is not instilled in the child, it will be difficult to get that same youth to spend time in the library later.
The following is an elegant poem written by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of the greatest American poets, associated with the spirit of reading in the library:
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry —
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll —
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul —
It compares a book to a ship (Frigate) and a poem to a horse (Courser), suggesting that even the poorest person can travel across the world and beyond, free of charge and in the simplest of conditions, through reading in a library. More importantly, this poem celebrates the library’s greatest gift: the book as the portal to manifest the true powers of the human soul: thought, understanding, imagination, and memory.
Learning to use AI does not confer the same benefits as when we are using our receptive heart and conscious mind to read a book. Besides, there is so much we can learned from all the good books in the library for as John Milton had declared in Areopagitica (1644): “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
Today, as Hainan gradually develops as a Free Trade Port, it is essential that the parents in Hainan inculcate in their children the habit of reading in the community library so that these tender souls will be trained from early childhood to think, imagine, understand, and memorize, and be imbued with an international mindset. These same Hainanese children will then be well-equipped with an international mindset, together with fluency in English, to run the HNFTP in 20 years.
Hence, Mona and I view it as our calling to constantly encourage Hainanese parents to bring their children to the community library and, at the same time, to motivate these primary school children from the various parts of Hainan to learn English.
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