Why my library matters to me

When I visited my grandparents in China last spring, my grandfather stood atop a chair and handed me my dad’s collection of books from a cupboard. They were wrapped in plastic bags, each with a mothball. Bugs, too, can be voracious readers.

Among the collection was a slim volume that was stitch bound and well worn. It was a pocketbook in which someone had hand-copied an entire book of poetry from the Tang dynasty. It lay right next to the hardcover copy of the same volume. A gift, my grandfather explained.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government banned books, and the mob burned them. High-school students were sent to rural labour camps. The “revolutionaries,” who locked down universities, took pride in not knowing literature and so persecuted those who did.

In one of the camps, where my father and his classmates worked 12-hour days, someone had smuggled in a poetry anthology. Nobody spoke of it, but at night, in the privacy of their beds, these 18-year-old kids lit candles to copy this book. Not all of them loved poetry, but they all pored over it and took their turns. From one pair of hands to the next, the book circulated through the camp and on to the next one. Where it passed, manuscripts were left behind, and those, in turn, were copied, then passed on.

The copy in my hand was my father’s. Some pages were smudged, some words crossed out and rewritten. It was a copy of a copy of a copy, and so perhaps held many errors. But he kept it even after he bought the hardcover volume years after the Revolution.

I thought about that while I tried to decipher some of the poems in it. I thought about how it would be to copy an entire book by candlelight while I rode the bus to the Shaanxi Provincial Public Library. It had opened in 2001, years after I had left the country. Yet, going in for the first time reminded me of my first public library in Canada. It was the Kingsgate Mall branch on East Broadway in Vancouver.

When my father left for New York, that was where I could e-mail him because we didn’t have a computer at home. When my mother went to work at the textile factory, that was where I whiled away the idle summers. I made friends there, learned English there, found my favourite authors there and applied for my first job from there. It offered more than just books. It offered a refuge amidst life’s urgencies, where thoughts can breathe. It offered a community that was united by an unspoken passion. It offered a chance to explore the world despite age, time or material means. And it offered a freedom I did not realize I took for granted then.

Once, a long time ago, libraries were filled with hand-copied books.

Origin
Source: Globe&Mail