Reading is A Low-Cost Noble

The Hangzhou Library allows vagrant people to read inside. The only requirement is to wash their hands.

Some citizens could not accept it. Curator Chu Shuqing said: "I have no right to refuse them to study, but you have the right to leave."

It is a good thing full of positive energy, and some citizens can not accept it. I think those citizens who can not accept it must be scholars otherwise they would not express their attitude so clearly. But I do not understand, since you are a scholar, why can not you accept homeless people to study together? Human beings have a consensus that reading is a noble pursuit. Reading is not defined by any specific group of people. The more homeless people are, the more they live the low life. The more people who want to study should have the desire to learn.

My daughter is in the fourth grade of elementary school, and the school held an on-site composition competition. As a result, it was a quiet third-grade girl who won first place. It made my daughter quite unconvinced. This competition is the topic of scene-You are the most beautiful in my heart. She wrote about Ding Ling in the Yan An period and wrote about a woman who was still noble in the difficult years of war. The essay is smooth and beautiful in language, rigorous in structure and perspective. According to habitual thinking, the teachers in the Chinese group guessed that this little girl should come from a scholarly family or a particularly wealthy family, with a large collection of books and very knowledgeable parents. When the teacher asked her, she replied: "My father is a laid-off worker in an electronics factory. Now there is a small shop doing home appliance repairs, and my mother is a staff member of a housekeeping service company."

There are not many collections of books at home. Reading is benefited from an accidental harvest of a mother. It turned out that when the mother was cleaning up a family, the owner of this family sorted out several old books and arranged for her to sell the books together with a bundle of old newspapers. A mother who had no culture but inexplicably loved books, she was not willing but asked the employer to give it to her daughter. Among several books, there is Ding Ling's Sun Shines on the Sanggan River. The girl read again and again with the book, completely integrating herself into Ding Ling's inner world.

The language of her composition is fluent, the structure is rigorous, and the point of view is bright, just because she has read a book thoroughly.

There hired a new cleaner in the new village where I live. A young woman from the countryside is here to accompany a child with congenital cerebral palsy to do physiotherapy. By the way, she works to earn some money, and she usually wears dirty clothes.

There is a bookstore near my home. I often drop by for a stroll and occasionally buy a book. One time,  when I was in the most remote corner of the bookstore, I suddenly saw this young woman who dressed in a clean and beautiful dress, holding a thick fairy tale eloquently and vividly reading to the child with a low voice, and the child listened carefully. They two fully immersed in the beautiful story. I stopped by them for a long time, but they did not know me.

This woman who gives books to children is a noble mother, and her hard life will not overwhelm her.

I also had this kind of reading experience when I was a child. When I was most eager to read in elementary school, there was no book to read at home. At that time, there was an old book stand in a small town five or six miles away from home. There was a complete set of comics like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Journey to the West. You can sit there and read at a time. You can not take it away. At that time, I often sat there and read until the sun slanting west. Now, I feel that many of my basic knowledge of history still benefited from reading at that time.

Reading is a low-cost noble behavior. The Hangzhou Library is open to homeless people. It is to respect their noble right; to ask for handwashing is to cherish the noble book. As for citizens who do not welcome homeless people, I think the curator’s words reveal the nobility that this library should have:  whether the readers are local tyrants or homeless people, it is the real nobility of a city to promote reading for all and read more.