This is not my first English journal post. For some reasons, I found that it is so much easier to express my feelings – good or bad – using a language other than my mother tongue. Yes I do need to stop and think about which words to use or how to better construct a sentence, but the feeling of jumping outside of my personal perspective and viewing from a 3rd person makes me feel honest, and sincere.

The motivation, however, is quite different. I’ve read many books about a situation, when the offspring had a difficult time reading or even understanding their ancestor’s words. Not to say I am at the age of starting some Memoirs, but I admit my confidence of Anbo (my son) is able to read all the content in this blog, is becoming low. There will be one day, that he receives the ownership of this domain and all the commits from this repository when I passed, and he has no idea what this is about, and what his father was thinking at some of his ages. And this post I am writing, can act like a perfect introduction. If you are reading this, my son, you know what I meant. Considering that the only reader of this blog is me and some ChatGPT models, it’s a bit over-thinking. But there are chances.

All this was started from a moment, when I was trying to teach Anbo to write his name. He is okay. He held the pen and started writing. A huge “A”, following a huge “n” (note that the tip on the top was added separately), followed by a funny looking “b” and a circle. I don’t know what’s the average level of a four-year old in name-writing, but I am glad he wrote it, despite from right to left. But then it’s the time that I started to realize, it might take a hell of an effort for him to understand, or even write the Chinese words like “岳阳楼记”. Thinking about this makes me sad. Not to say how much I value the Chinese culture, but I do think it’s such a beautiful thing. I was considered “talented” in terms of Chinese literature when I was at school, thanks to my mother’s early education, which gaves me tons of confidence coming from nowhere. But, that specific thing, is likely to get lost in Anbo. I am imagining a day when he grows up, and he were talking in English fluently. But the personality and the culture come with the Chinese language, is gone.

One other thing that I found when I write in English is that it’s very easy to get lost, and be burried with lots of non-sense, like most of the content in the paragraph above. Anyway it’s just a following the flow of my mind. Not sure what I am typing but certainly not something very important. I am going to watch the TV after this.