FEATURE - WHY WE STARTED TO READ

TEXT_Yvonne Yu/Yan Lam

PHOTOS_Casli Lao/Un Hon In

ILLUSTRATOR_Minqian Zhang

In this age where information flows like waves, we are flooded and exhausted by all kinds of messages day in and day out. In the recent two years, the pandemic has set us more on edge and made us lose our bearings. What we expect from reading is not chicken soup for the soul or a lesson; instead, it should be like a cup of tea, immersing readers in the world of reading where they can enjoy the pure pleasure of it and continue their journey with the founding aspiration in mind.

Speaking of bookstores in Macao, “Pin-to Livros” must be an oft-repeated name. It is run by Anson Ng, a familiar name in the cultural sector in Macao who has been reading for years and takes reading as his profession. How was his first encounter with reading that inspired him to make a career out of “books”?

Recalling his student days, Anson told us that his experience of skipping lessons led to his first contact with reading. “I used to be a student excelling both in morals and studies, yet my academic performance nosedived after my teenage rebellion had started. I was always confused by the idea of reading as, back in the day, reading referred only to reading textbooks or books related to our study. There were not many books you could choose from in Macao.” Once, coincidentally, he skipped lessons to visit Hong Kong and read books, and this experience opened another door of “reading” to him. “Hong Kong people were spoiled with bookstores opened on the second floor of a building, which offered a wide variety of choices. This triggered my passion for books right away and I visited almost every one of the independent bookstores there.” Later, he went to Taiwan for further study, where the strong reading environment made him more obsessed with books. “I was also deeply affected by my work experience in Eslite Bookstore after my graduation, although the department I was in was not responsible for books.”

When the time came, Anson opened a bookstore upstairs named “Pin-to Livros” with several partners. He believes that entering the industry is a gradual process. “It is quite amazing that no one would dislike the scene where someone is holding a book in his/her hands to read, right? The fact that the original folio design of books allowing readers to turn the page has found its way into today’s world since it was devised several centuries ago manifests how marvellous this design is! No matter how you read and where you read, it is always meant to pass positivity and happiness on to people.” His initial idea of sharing the joy of reading has motivated him to keep injecting new reading momentum into Macao.

It is an interesting “evolution” where we shift from only having a hazy understanding of books in our childhood to consciously looking for books we want. Family also plays an important role in developing children’s interest in reading. Lin Hsiang Chun, the owner of Júbilo 31 Books, shared with us the stories of reading of her two sons – Marcelo and Mário.

Despite being in the same family, the ten-year-old Marcelo and the five-and-a-half-year-old Mário are poles apart in terms of their personalities, which results in different reading preferences. Marcelo reads like a “scholar”: instead of expressing himself, he is more fascinated by pictures and details. Lin gave us an example. When they had guests one time, Marcelo welcomed them by showing them all the books containing “goldfish”. “He did remember on which page of which book there is a goldfish!” On the contrary, Mário has a more introverted personality. He can sit still and read his favourite books over and over again. His discernment also allows him to clearly explain his preferences in a book and raise many thought-provoking questions.

Lin guides her sons to read “without KPI (Key Performance Indicators)”. When her sons were little, she used to stack books, most of which were her personal favourites, around them so that they could choose what to read freely. “They like picture books a lot. Marcelo loves The Changing Countryside, a book almost out of print now, so much that he has broken it apart, and the one in my bookstore will soon be out of print, too.” Books printed in this form serve as an archetype for children to pick up reading. The Changing Countryside includes several paintings, which depict the changes of the same place in the countryside every three years between 1953 and 1972. The fold-out spreads give children an intuitive sense of how the landscape changed over time. Filled with love, it is how Lin introduced reading to her children in a subtle way.

President Cyan Cheong and Chairman Warren Kam of the Macau Association of Reading Popularization

Reading by yourself is interesting in one way while sharing what you read with fellow readers from different backgrounds in a reading group offers a different experience. Aiming to encourage people to read and to share books with others, Cyan Cheong and Warren Kam established the Macau Association of Reading Popularization, which holds reading group activities on a monthly basis. The Association started with only several close friends and has expanded to include over 70 members from different backgrounds. Thanks to this Association, many people can resume reading after putting it on hold for a long time, and therefore feed into a positive reading environment.

Cyan Cheong is the President of the Macau Association of Reading Popularization and also a local publisher. More importantly, she is a book lover. The Association was born out of a small reading and sharing group that met on a regular basis. The members included Cyan, Warren and several friends who love reading. Later, as they took more and more friends there, the Macau Association of Reading Popularization was eventually established. “To me, reading is part of my life. It shows me different cultures, other people’s lives and authors’ thinking, etc. It gives me access to a boundless universe. The wide variety of books introduced by the members in the Association have inspired my personal growth and brought new possibilities to the publishing industry that I work in,” said Cyan.

Warren Kam, another contributor to the Association, attended many different reading groups in Macao and mainland China. He noticed that sharing what he read with others could reinforce his memory about the book and listening to other people’s sharing could expose him to new ideas. It resembles the compound interest effect, where everyone gains knowledge and grows together. Warren said with conviction that “no matter how many books you read, it is always less efficient than reading with a bunch of fellow readers. I find it quite fascinating to read with others as I have a special preference for science books while others share a lot about fiction and travel books, guiding me into fields I’ve never been to. Reading and sharing allow us to expand our horizons, reduce our blind spots and push back our boundaries.”

Books are readily available to today’s students, yet they were a luxury to those in the 1950s to 1960s, including Choi Fong Meng, who is now a retired teacher. Back in the day, reading gave her the simplest joy amidst the shortages of everything. It influenced her to become a teacher, from where she could influence the next generation in the same fashion.

Choi recalled that: “When I was little, the rice merchants would put rice into bags made of folded newspaper for sale. Every time my mother came back home from the merchant, she would carefully put the newspaper away and read it when she had time. Her habit rubbed off on my siblings and me, and as a result, we picked up reading naturally.” Choi reads extensively, including fairy tales, fiction, world magazines and classic literature works. Wuxia (martial arts) novels, especially those written by Liang Yusheng and Jin Yong, are among her favourites. She and her siblings tightened their purse strings so that they could rent books from the “bookstalls” then and plunge into the Wuxia world imbued with chivalry.

She was a part-time student in middle school. No matter how tired she was after a day’s work, she never skipped any literature classes in night school. Her persistence landed her a role as a Chinese teacher. While teaching at a primary school, she always made the articles she read into bite-size stories to trigger her students’ interest in reading. She found it most rewarding that reading helped students to breed confidence. “Many years ago, I ran into a stammering student. One day he took me by surprise when he talked to me about a story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I encouraged him to discuss the stories in the book with me whenever he had time. He did it, as a matter of fact, for a whole term. I was delighted to see that he could express himself more clearly and become more confident. After going into middle school, he came back to visit me and told me that he loved reading history books so much that he wanted to dig deeper into this field. Reading is just nothing more than a habit, yet it is subtly shaping our lives.”

The epidemic has changed everyone’s life in one way or another, including our reading habits. In response to the growing demand for electronic resources in the comfort of one’s personal space, the Macao Public Library under the Cultural Affairs Bureau has proactively rolled out new arrangements, such as holding online exhibitions, lectures and providing diversified electronic resources. Compared to 2019, the frequency of readers' use of electronic resources is on the rise after the outbreak of the COVID19. E-books, e-newspapers, e-magazines, e-databases and online learning resources for children witnessed exponential growth in their clicks in 2020, with monthly clicks hitting an all-time high of over 200,000 and the total clicks in the year surpassing the 1.6 million mark. As for borrowed e-books, the total count of borrowing and browsing in the second half of 2019 reached over 40,000, and the figure quadrupled in the first half of the following year up to 182,000. The first three quarters of 2021 also witnessed an accumulated count of that of 147,000. To meet readers’ growing demands for e-books, the Macao Public Library has made continuous efforts to increase and diversify its e-book volumes. Flipster, a digital magazine newsstand, and Access Science, an electronic database, were added in 2020 and 2021 respectively to give readers more choices. As of now, there are over 16,000 categories of e-books, ranging from newspapers and magazines, picture books to professional academic resources, to cater to readers’ varying demands.

Electronic Resource Usage Statistics （1st Quarter of 2019 to 3rd Quarter of 2021）

Numbers of Using Electronic Resources