After my four sons and daughters turned into "bananas" (yellow on the outside but white on the inside), they knew their father was a writer, but they didn't know and couldn't appreciate whatever was in the novels and essays he wrote with those arrange symbols. Their having cast off the burden of Chinese culture has always weighed heavily on my mind. Last year, my eldest granddaughter Ju-pei, who was almost three, started coming every day to be looked after by her grandparents. She is engaging and quick-witted, and seeing me sitting working at my desk, she asked inquisitively what I was writing--and could she play too?

In a flash of inspiration, I realized that even though my own children had lost contact with our culture, if I could pass the torch to the next generation--if my grandchild could learn Chinese--not only would the broken link be mended, but she would be able read my poems and stories too. So I bought a pack of Chinese-character picture flashcards, and every day after my granddaughter awoke from her afternoon nap, I invited her to come and play reading with Grandpa.

Anything young children do to pass the time is play, and play is all they are interested in. At less than three years old, there's no way my granddaughter understood concepts like the value of culture. Sitting with her on the living room carpet, I would first show her a picture, then the Chinese character on the back of the card. I taught her a new character each day, and also got her to repeat a line of Tang poetry. Along with the new we would practice what she had learnt before, and together we learnt to recite Meng Haoran's "Chun Xiao." After she had learnt a few poems off by heart, I would sometimes have her say the first line, and I would say the second. Now and then I would pretend to forget my line--for instance, if she had started with "The red beans grow in the southland," I would rack my brains in foolish silence until my granddaughter, who loves to be one up, could bear it no longer and would call out "When spring..." to remind me of the second line. Only then would I follow on with "When spring comes the shoots sprout." This would always fill her with glee at having beaten Grandpa.

The meaning of those poems was not something I could explain to her, but with the flashcards I could get her to understand the sense of each of the characters I taught her. When she was learning 鵝e ("goose"), 鴿ge ("pigeon") and 鴨ya ("duck"), she had trouble telling them apart, so I took her to the artificial river in the botanical gardens to watch the geese, ducks and doves. I let her chase them, and took her photo with them, which all made such a deep impression on her that she didn't confuse them any more.

When teaching her the character 雲 yun ("cloud"), I pointed to the clouds in the sky, and she fluently recited "Dense clouds veil your tracks." When she was learning the character 花hua ("flower"), she reeled off "Who knows how many flowers have fallen?" 拔Ba ("pull up") is a verb, so I took her out into the back garden, reached down and pulled up some grass to explain it to her. 鋸 Ju ("saw") is both an action and an object, so there was nothing for it but to fetch a saw to show her, then demonstrate by sawing a branch off a tree. When she had learnt to recognize a hundred or so individual characters, I began stringing them together into sentences, such as: "The cat is jumping," "The dog is running," "The man is fishing," "The cows and sheep are drinking water," "The lion and tiger are laughing," "The birds are singing," and so on.

After she learnt the character 山 shan ("mountain"), I told her that adding an extra shan would make 出chu ("go out"); when she had learnt 刀dao ("knife") I taught her 力 li ("strength"); when she understood 石shi ("stone"), she could also read 右you ("right"). Whenever I was reading a book or newspaper, Ju-pei would hang around me looking through the characters in it, and would always find some words she already knew. If she read them correctly I would give her a few words of praise and her face would light up with a happy smile.

Once I took her with me to a formal dinner, and we sat at the same table as Rose Jane Cheng, director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Melbourne. Picking up this three-year-old little compatriot who had recited five Tang poems to her, Ms. Cheng suggested I should enter my granddaughter for the "Gifted Children's Performance Competition," although the competition is not open to children under five. My granddaughter has a good memory, and for her, learning Chinese characters and reciting Tang poems was a "game" she played with Grandpa. Learning unconsciously through play doesn't actually take any great genius!

By her third birthday last December she had learnt all 130 characters in my pack of flashcards. The thought that one day my granddaughter will be able to read my novels in Chinese gives me tremendous joy!

This exhibit of how mainland farms cage bears to drain their gall was shown at one of the "save-the-bears" activities sponsored by conservation groups in Taipei early this year. （photo courtesy of Life Conservationist Association of ROC）