Literacy Narrative
When I was a little boy, only Mum was home with my sister and me. My father was an army man, he did not retire from the army until I was 10 years old. Mum raised me up almost all by herself. Mum had no books to read to me. But she had a lot of stories, mostly monster and ghost stories told to her by her mother. She could not remember everything of those stories, so every time the story was told to me, only the characters in the stories remained the same. Amazingly, almost all these stories served to fulfill one purpose, that was, to frighten me to behave myself. All the heroes in these stories were wild beasts, monsters or even devils that I had no idea what they are at all. Every now and, Mum also used the police to frighten me. So, I did not have a good impression on the police even until today.
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Mum taught me to recognize Chinese characters, and I could actually read newspaper when other children were still crying and had a running nose. The reason why I could only read newspaper was that we did not have many books at all. A lot of households just found their own ways to get some used newspaper and put them on the wall as a kind of decoration, before we could afford white paint or cement. So my experience of reading started from reading used newspapers. The first book I read was actually a Chinese textbook Mum borrowed from others. From the textbook I learned about Lady Spring and little swallow … The first book I owned is a picture book, which had a large picture in the page with caption at the bottom of the picture. Mum bought it for me and I read the book again and again and again. I did not exactly remember the story, but I can still remember the name. I did not know whether there was a library at school, the major sources of books were some of my classmates.