FEATURE

TEXT：Yvonne Yu、Yan Lam　PHOTOS：Panda Lei　ILLUSTRATOR：Yami Yu

Warren Buffett once said that if he had not read The Intelligent Investor at the age of 19, his whole life would have taken a completely contrary path. A good book is like a good confidant who accompanies us on our life journey. The pleasure brought by worldly objects can become tiresome over time, but the pleasure of reading is always renewed. Only this “confidant” shows more and more vitality as the years go by, which makes people love it more and be willing to follow its lead.

In recent years, the SAR Government has been proactively promoting the development of a “City of Reading”, fostering reading literacy through a variety of promotion approaches and a consistent supply of reading resources, which has quietly and gradually turned reading into a good friend of the residents. In this feature, we will focus on the theme of “Read Fun, Love More” to discover “reading lovers” from all walks of life in the city who are in love with reading. We will also analyse the practical data of “Interlibrary Loan” and “Document Delivery” to show the latest results of the “City of Reading” initiative. Let us follow the steps of the three “reading lovers” and feel the power of “reading” which can be a game-changer in your life.

Enoch Ho, born in the 1990s, is the manager of the Big Pie Art Gallery in Macao. In addition to his day-to-day office leasing duties, he follows the slogan of the workplace: “This is not an office”, and aspires to diversify his career, ranging from administrative management to art curating, and everything in between.

However, who would have thought that Enoch, who performs well at work, was once a “king of truant” who liked nothing about school? “I have to start with three turning points, and at each phase there was a book that had a profound impact on me. At the beginning, when I was in Form 4, I was not interested in studying, and often skipped classes to read novels in the library. I happened to read the book Dying to Go by Yusuke Ishida, which was the first book that changed my life”. Like the author of the book, Enoch was a former cyclist who loved to see the world by riding a bicycle. After finishing the book, he dropped out of school and spent three months cycling from Yunnan to Tibet, living a Gap year at will.

During his days wandering around Dali, Enoch came across his second book: the classic philosophical novel Sophie’s World. After finishing the book, he gasped and exclaimed, “I can still remember the comfort of zoning out and lying on the grass while reading a book, it was an ineffable sense of fulfilment”. The book seemed to open a magnetically attractive door to philosophy, and the learning process of the 14-year-old Sophie brought Enoch a sudden realisation of the connection with a world he once saw as chaotic. As such, he decided to continue his studies and travelled to Australia to study film and television production, his favourite subject, and concentrated on his storytelling expertise.

The third book that influences Enoch’s life is the poetry selection My Loneliness is a Garden, written by the renowned Syrian poet Adunis. Like Sophie’s World, it was a serendipitous discovery on the trip, and has now become Enoch’s bedside book. He said that the best time to browse through the book is when he is slightly drunk, and he can get inspiration on a random page. Some of his indie film scripts were derived from the poems in this book, which gave him much food for thought.

Enoch made his first major life decision under the influence of a book, and in the process of carrying out this decision, he came across another book… It was in this interlocking chain of events that these books fuelled Enoch’s life in a subtle way. “Don’t you think that it has philosophical significance in itself?” This is how he made a conclusion to his fun reading journey.

Enoch, having roved about Dali and Tibet during secondary school, was reading a book while lying on the grass, which turned out to be a life-changing experience. (Photo courtesy of the interviewee)

For Macao culinary artist Maggie Chiang, reading has given her knowledge and the courage to break new ground. Over the years, she has transformed herself from a marketing professional into a culinary tutor, a restaurant chef, a bakery owner, and a curator of food and art events, to name just a few, and reading has opened up endless possibilities for her.

When did the gears of a chef’s destiny begin to turn? In fact, Maggie has had a keen interest in cooking since she was little, but never felt a pull of starting a restaurant. She used to work during the day and read recipes after work to hone her cooking skills, and working as a cooking tutor at the bakery centre became her daily enjoyment. She once travelled to Taiwan to attend a cooking training course, where she was much inspired by the book Anthropologist in the Kitchen that she read in the Eslite bookshop. As an anthropologist, the author’s experience in cooking inspired her to enter the field of professional chefs. She then quitted her job and travelled to France and Italy to further her culinary studies, and later returned to Macao to establish a cooking classroom and an Italian-French restaurant.

“I am the kind of person who finds it hard to stop myself from moving forward, as I feel terrible for not gaining new knowledge. Reading is a great way to absorb new knowledge, which allows me to have a breakthrough and unfold more possibilities.” In recent years, philosophical books have been Maggie’s favourite. The process of reading the classic works of philosophers not only inspired her to integrate art and philosophy into culinary, but also to encourage her to enrol in a master’s course in philosophy. Even her master’s dissertation was inspired by the book Phenomenology of Perception, by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, where she developed a philosophical analysis of the aesthetics of taste through the framework of the phenomenology of perception, and deepened her understanding of how people obtain aesthetic experience through their taste buds.

With her more profound understanding of taste and philosophy, Maggie has started a new project in recent years – Tasteractive, an interactive experience that combines food and art. She and her team have begun to collaborate with different art and cultural entities in the hope of inspiring the public to rethink the sense of taste. As Maggie cannot stop, in addition to her bakery shop and Tasteractive, she also wants to publish a book one day, featuring recipes of her special dishes, integrating her food stories and philosophies over the years, in order to share her moments of “happy reading” with more people.

Tasteractive interactive experience presented by Maggie and her team at Macao Design Week (Photo courtesy of Macao Design Week)

As a public figure, Professor Alfred Wong of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Macau has multiple identities, from a scholar who expresses his views on urban construction and engineering in the media, to a dean of college which is familiar to his students, and turns into a good husband and father when he returns home. Amid these identities swaps, the positive impact of reading is ever present, “I have developed various reading habits at different stages of my life, and these habits not only met the needs of my identity at that time, but also expanded the boundaries of my cognition.”

Professor Wong, who started out his career in teaching, likes to read educational books related to his work. A few years later, when he started to get involved in the association works in Macao, it led him to read massive professional publications, most of which are related to the engineering industry. At the current stage, as he needs to supervise research students, Professor Wong also likes to read sociology-related books, such as culture and politics, living space planning, etc., to enrich his knowledge base.

Reading is a way to enhance emotional communication with students. In recent years, Professor Wong and other colleagues at the College have been actively organising the book club, which he believes is one of the ways to guide students to make real use of book knowledge to solve problems. In today’s fast-food era, many young people prefer to acquire knowledge through the Internet, but the authenticity and accuracy of the information is questionable. “It is more reliable to go to the UM library and the public libraries in Macao to look for literary documents and journals as a basis for research, while the book club is an effective means to motivate students to digest and understand before transmitting ideas.”

In addition to the “fun reading” experience for his career, Professor Wong also shared his reading moments with his family. He became fascinated with Chinese tea because of Lu Yu’s book The Classic of Tea, which contains many fascinating insights into the culture of tea and is the book he shares most with his friends and family. “One day, my family of four participated in a planning competition for a tea ceremony at the Mandarin’s House, and the proposition was the life of Zheng Guanying. My two daughters and I had read the book, and from it, we came up with the idea of using the colour of tea to express the rise and fall of the prosperous times and thus reflect the life of Zheng Guanying. This is a kind of reading comprehension and creation about the interest in Guoxue (national studies).” Professor Wong believes that one of the most useful techniques to cultivate interest is to read supplementary books, and it is important to pick the ones that interest you and not just to read them once, but to repeat them many times in order to understand the concepts thoroughly.

The development of a “City of Reading” is not only encouraging people to read in libraries, but also striving to create a convenient environment for everyone to enjoy reading at any time. In the past few years, the Public Library of the Cultural Affairs Bureau have continued to enhance their hardware and software facilities, launched a variety of reading promotion activities, the book delivery service had also been introduced for the convenience of the disabled, non-profit organisations and schools to borrow library collections, as well as the “Interlibrary Loan” and “Document Delivery” services in collaboration with the University of Macau, to spread the pleasant scent of books to associations, schools, academics and researchers, so that readers with different needs can enjoy the fun of reading at no distance.

Since its launch in 2020, the book delivery service has received requests from several associations. By the end of December 2023, 19 associations and schools have registered to use the service, with a cumulative total of nearly 10,000 books and items delivered to readers.

To expand the sharing of resources, the Cultural Affairs Bureau and the University of Macau jointly launched the “Interlibrary Loan” and “Document Delivery” services in 2019. For using these two ser-vices, readers only need to submit their applications at the library. As of December 2023, more than 140 applicants have registered for the “Interlibrary Loan” service. The “Document Delivery” service, designed to cater to the needs of scholars and researchers for accessing journal articles, books and other documents housed in the UM Library, effectively breaks the resource limitations and realises the complementary services of the Macao Library network. As one of the reading lovers, Professor Wong has used this service and pointed out that it greatly eases the lives of teachers and students who may conduct research without leaving the campus and get the research data they require.

Notes:

1-Readers may borrow books and materials from the UM Library with a valid slip issued by the branch library.

2-Readers may borrow photocopies of book and periodical chapters from the UM Library (The UM Library reserves the right of final decision and will charge photocopying fees pursuant to the rules of the Public Library of the Cultural Affairs Bureau).

Read with satisfaction. We recommend five books in workplace, self-improvement and fiction categories. Choose one that arouses your interest and start reading! Books may not be able to change the course of your life, but they can certainly be the nutrients to increase the breadth and depth of your life, igniting the spark in your mind and helping to mould a better you.