Be my father!
Lin was a multitalented dad. He spent days working as an editor with the Mandarin Daily News, and late nights hunched over his desk at home writing. He also took care of his three daughters, personally dealing with physical, psychological, and school-related issues as they arose. He also often put the family's limited funds to use taking them on frequent trips abroad. And, unlike most doting fathers, he gave them more freedom as they grew, allowing them to learn to stand on their own two feet.
Sixteen Letters from Dad was his way of responding to his kids' confusions and helping them learn to be adults.
Lin's initial motivation for writing the letters was his eldest daughter's completion of elementary school and start of middle school. He was busy with work-deadlines and meetings kept him at the office past dinner-and was going two or three days at a time without seeing his daughters. During this period, the written word was his only means of communicating with them, and he sometimes found himself answering his daughter's questions-things like "Why does everyone ignore me?" and "Why are other people different from me?"-in long letters composed in the dead of the night.
Around this time, Pan Jen-mu, a fellow author and head of the editorial division of the provincial government's education department, approached him about doing some writing. He wanted Lin to craft a few pieces about life for young people. Not wanting to preach, Lin drew on first-hand information from his daughter to shape an epistolary work which is still widely read in middle schools.
Hsiao Yeh encountered Lin's work as an adolescent. Now 58 and himself an author, he recalls finding it hard to believe there could be such a great father anywhere in the world.
"Most fathers then were serious and forbidding," recalls Hsiao Yeh. "They were no good at expressing their feelings. They didn't even let their family members talk during meals. In contrast, Mr. Lin seemed always to be smiling and even warmer and sweeter than a mother. He didn't put any pressure on his kids, and was eminently reasonable in his approach to education and communication." This created a kind of yearning in Hsiao Yeh, whose relations with his own father were then somewhat strained. But the book also offered him some solace.
Lin reveals that in those days many young readers wrote to him after reading his book, and a large number of these letter writers wanted him to be their father. Their letters show that children are easily moved, and that they offer you their love in full measure if you just show them some kindness.
Not just an excellent writer, Lin is no slouch as an illustrator, either. The images on the right are from Lin Liang's Personal Paintings, published by Taiwan Mac Educational Publishing. They include a scene with trees lining a Beijing street in winter, and a reader curled up with a blanket and a book. All were done entirely by Lin himself.