Although everyone in my household is a reader, today when helping my mother pack and move her things I discovered she owned even more books that I do –

Classical, modern and contemporary Chinese poetry, essays, fiction, and criticism; books on historic linguistics and etymology; grammar and pedagogical references of every kind (I didn’t think anyone would want to know that much about syntax); a huge collection of translated literature, particularly classic and contemporary European and Japanese writers (Kundera, Calvino, Mishima, Murakami were just some that caught my eye); works by Singapore and Malaysian writers in Chinese (what she wrote her undergraduate thesis on); works of history and philosophy; folktales, mythology, fairy tales, children’s literature (I thought all the works of Chinese children’s literature in this house were in my room, but I found so many on hers!); references and encyclopedias (a set of the Britannica in Chinese, the mind boggles - the days of physical encyclopedias!), and also, reflecting her later life and change of career, about 100 or so works on counselling, social work and psychotherapy.

I like my mother. Litty mothers are the best!

Along the way I found an annotated companion to the 红楼梦, and some historical surveys and anthologies of classical Chinese poetry, with wonderful headnotes, which I used when studying Chinese literature back when I was doing the A Levels.