“I remember distinctly the suddenness with which a key turned in a lock and I found I could read…” So wrote Graham Greene in his essay entitled The Lost Childhood.

We are all shaped by our childhood experience, though in our adult years we tend to lose our innocence, and can recall those important moments only through the hazy cobweb of our memory. .

My moment of enlightenment came when I was about four years old. In those impoverished days just after the war in Kuching, my family lived in a rented room in a house with earthen floor. My father used to squat on the floor and, scratching the characters on the floor with a stick, taught me my first Chinese words: cow, goat, grass, and flower.