Comics

While wondering about good books for general education, I found myself engaged in another casual luncheon discussion on nitty gritty of bringing up our children.

“We really should boost up their capability of Chinese,” LS said, “I don’t mean only the spoken Putonghua, but the Chinese language – reading, writing, and all these.”

All of us could not agree more.

“The real problem is, children nowadays don’t like to read books!” FK signed, “As soon as they see a page full of words, they just turn away. Chinese is particularly difficult because you really need to recognize the characters. Otherwise, no reading as such is possible. For English, even if you don’t know the words, as long as you have some basic skill of phonics, you could well pronounce the words and read along.”

“I end up giving my children Chinese comics as supplementary readings,” NT – our professor of chemical pathology – added, “You know, there are excellent comics adaptations of many classical Chinese novels, for example, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Return of the Condor Heroes – many of them were done by Li Chi Ching (李志清).”

“I do the same actually,” WY remarked, “A small problem is the stories are often a little too bloody for a primary school student.”

“How could that be? I think the stories are all very modest!” I was naïve enough to say.

“That’s because you read the original text,” NT was smiling, “When the descriptions are turned into drawings, you take away the imagination but ... you know what would happen!"