I've always been a fan of books. One of the few memories of my kindergarten years that I still have to this day is sitting in a chair in front of a roomful of older kids, with a story book open in my lap, with a somewhat trembling voice, reading a story for the class. I suppose this has to do with I being raised by my grandma who was an elementary school Chinese teacher before I was born, and books were always plentiful during my childhood.
I suppose as a child, even well into my teenage years, as I moved to the US and faced a new and unfamiliar environment, books became the constant in my life. When I first arrived in the US and began my education at Hudson River Middle School, my favorite part of the day was always the English class during which I could pick books I thought were interesting and immerse myself in them. Of course, I was encouraged to read, and those novels and biographies I read during the first two years in the US did great wonders to help me build my vocabulary and allowed me to quickly fill knowledge gaps in American history.
As a co-founder of the Chinese Language Society during high school, books became the medium through which I introduced many facets of Chinese culture and history to students who wanted to learn about their Chinese heritage, and by extension to better their understanding of the world from which their parents, grandparents had come.
My favorite and most memorable class during my high school years was not in science or math, despite my high school being one of the top math and science schools in the nation, it was actually an elective English class appropriately named "Crisis in Values in Twentieth Century Literature." Taught by the then English department chairman Dr. Shapiro, the class really was more about identifying challenges to society's values in some of the most well-known works of literature of the 20th century, including such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Angela's Ashes. For what it was worth, to this day I still think it was in that classroom that I participated in some of the most profound discussions about some of the most serious (and not so serious) issues in life. It's been nearly 15 years since I left that classroom, yet some of the thought-provoking questions we encountered in the books we read then still linger with me, and continue to influence the way I think.
Throughout my college years, books have often helped me find common grounds in a discussion, and some of the friendships I built during those years also have been influenced by our common love for certain works of literature or history.
As I have traveled from Ithaca to Manhattan to Ann Arbor, then to London and now to Hong Kong, my favorite past time remains visiting a bookstore on a weekend. Be it a Barnes & Nobles or Borders in the NYC, a Waterstones in London, or Page One and Metro Books in Hong Kong, there is a joy that I can only get by grasping in my hands a good paperback. Even with the advent of ebooks on Kindle and other electronic readers, the feel (and smell) of a new book is still intoxicating.
I find that the friends with whom I have the most in common often are the same ones with whom I share the same immense love for the same type of books. There are a few friends who I don't get to see in person very often, yet over the years we've always managed to exchange recommendations for good books. of the many new friends I have made along the way, those with whom I "click" right away are always those who share my interest in books, and in sharing their collections, allow me to continuously broaden my scope of knowledge and horizon.
So, without sounding like a total bookworm, I must say my life would not be quite the same without these books. Life's simplest pleasures often rest not in those seemingly grandiose objects or events, but rather in those ordinary things that have an impact on our hearts and souls.
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