By admin 
And by world, I mean the people most important to us
Who would want a child to stop reading? You’d be surprised. While Western parents will do everything to get their offspring to read, notwithstanding throwing money (didn’t I read a piece a few days ago, about a literary critic who paid her daughter a $100 so she’d read a book of her choice, cover to cover?) at them, immigrant parents aren’t the same.
Oh, sure, they’ll push books at you that stand to further your academic career, like a biology textbook or a dictionary to help widen your vocabulary (I remember a well-meant, yet, in hindsight, decidedly funny inscription in a German-English dictionary reading ‘Merry X-Mas and Happy New Year, Jasmin’). Even fiction, if that’s part of your required reading. Maybe, if you do well enough in school, you’ll have licence to read whatever the hell you like-which, in my adolescence, was a steady stream of stellar (The Lord of the Rings) and pulpy fantasy novels (out of sight, out of mind, as it often is with books that are part of a fad, I’m afraid!).
But there will come a time when you are told ‘to close that book and focus on your studies’.
Reading helps you develop empathy and people skills by letting you walk in the footsteps of others, people you might never encounter in the real world. It forces you to intimately engage with languages, cultures and places. It makes you question your knowledge. It challenges your moral views and maybe, it even helps you overcome your insecurities as you grapple your way towards a brighter future. Merely flipping those pages could serve to rewire your brain, helping you create new neural networks, something that can actually help you learn better and faster.
And that’s all just off the top of my head.
I’d argue that ANY book that engages you has the power to do all of this-whether it’s a textbook, or, God forbid, some ‘stupid story book’.
Those were the thoughts that flashed through my head in rapid succession when I recently overheard a snatch of conversation. I was in my local bookstore a couple days before Christmas. Looking for a breather from the stampeding hordes out looking for a last minute present, I ducked in to what I hoped would prove half an hour’s worth of blessed peace.
Strolling past the English language section, I brushed past a teenage girl who was clutching what seemed to be a YA novel of the mushy romance persuasion (No judgment here, just trying to paint a picture!). She looked Middle-Eastern and she was stroking a few fingers across the light pink cover of her book. Nothing out of the ordinary (a lot of bibliophiles just love stroking spines or grazing covers with their fingertips, in reverence-though smelling pages might be a bit much in public!) until she mouthed her concern into the phone:
‘My father took my book away because he said I was reading too much’.
This is the kind of thing that would strike your average English teacher with horror. Or, perhaps, any enlightened member of society who prides themselves on their well-stocked bookshelves. It puts me in mind of that one section in Shaun Bythell’s amusing Confessions of a Bookseller. (There’s a section where he mentions coming across a family who visit his store, the boy plonking down between the shelves, a stack of books close to him, whiling away the hours, finally begging his mother to buy him a novel. She ends up turning to Bythell, complaining in a half-exasperated manner that the only thing her child seems to want to do is read.)
Parents in migrant communities often have a different perspective on this. Often, they have a chip on their shoulder. Without a support structure, feeling alienated in a foreign country, worried over providing their children with a modicum of stability, these parents are stringently focused on giving their children ‘a leg up’. That’s why a ‘tiger parent’ is more likely to push educational books at their offspring while remaining dismissive of recreational reading, which can be seen as a waste of time. Creativity, originality, learning for life-that falls to the wayside in a results driven upbringing of the, ‘will this make my son or daughter more likely to become a doctor/lawyer/whatever highflying profession you can think of’ persuasion.
This often lends itself to rather amusing situations. I’ve heard of a guy in my Indian community who works in IT (shocker, I know!) who had to contend with his father at times declaring that he ‘should stop playing with his computer’. I don’t think my own parents fully understood back then how my reading of fictional stories (we’re talking everything from Austen to Murakami) helped me hone everything from my analytical skills (something that helped me during my short stint as a B2B journalist!) to my intrinsic creativity (a boost when planning out unusual angles for stories).
Why does this happen? Aside from the scarcity mindset that affects many immigrant parents, which translates to them being more focused on the material wellbeing of their offspring, few parents had the leisure to read for fun. It, too, may have been a means to an end-I can only think of my father’s old German language coursebooks that I read for the stories, annotated in blue ink throughout and long nights where I could hear my mother, who was more adept at it teaching my father nuances of grammar. (Safe to say, he never picked up a fictional novel for fun, sticking to the newspapers and the Bible in his mother tongue, Malayalam.)
The envision the father of the girl I encountered as a similar specimen. Harried, well-meaning but frustrated on how to get through to his daughter, whose keen interest (probably bordering on obsession, it’s that age after all!) he can’t really relate to.
It’s easy to imagine, because, if you take away the romance and substitute it for a cover featuring an emerald dragon, this could be my story.
As the daughter of Indian immigrants who grew up in Vienna, I was primed to read. Growing up in a household where the bonds were tight-knit but social circles were basically non-existent and family lived too far away, books became precious friends and ways to escape a life too quiet for a child bursting with life.
From Austen to King, I devoured everything. But when my teenage years hit and my grades in math started to suffer (I agree with Malcolm X who wrote on the subject: ‘I’m sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.’), I got a lot of flack for escaping into realms full of butterbeer and chocolate frog cards, second breakfasts and endless magic. Questioning religion and notions of sexuality also got me in the literary doghouse, copies of Drop City and On The Road mysteriously disappearing from my room. (I still grin thinking at the uproar at home that our school teacher made us read Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, that ‘absolute filth’.)
Not that that stopped me-and not that it stopped that girl, who, from the way she was cradling her paperback, seemed bent on buying her way into rebellion.
Is there an answer to this dilemma? The need to read, to want those closest to us to share in what amounts to a literal craze, when a seemingly insurmountable wall of perplexity surrounds us?
Maybe, if that answer is the gradual passage of time.
It’s been years since I couldn’t read what I wanted. But I will never know what it feels like to say ‘my mother got me stuck on writer X and that connected us, no matter how far away I was’. Instead, I have vague memories of ‘oh, Anna Karenina, I know the title’ and distinct debates about Bible passages, religious reading I took to when I saw that discussions on what I loved to read would never be possible within the confines of my family. (That is not to say that these conversations weren’t fascinating or deep-I mean, have you read the Bible? There’s enough contention there to satisfy someone who likes to nitpick for a lifetime.)
Still, I understood in hindsight that my parents were proud of my questioning habits, my overflowing stacks of books having given me the wherewithal to ‘get’ the things about their life they could never truly share with me. (Ironic, isn’t it, when the thing that you rail against becomes the thing that saves you?)