By Heart
When I was growing up in China, a sizable part of both my Chinese and English classes were spent on memorizing and reciting. For Chinese class, we had textbooks consisting of selected passages of great works, from both Chinese literature and world literature translated to Chinese. After each piece, the textbook usually had a section with technical exercises, reading guidance, and reflection questions. Many pieces had the technical exercise of “memorize and recite from memory the entirety of this piece.”
My classmates and I kinda hated these. Rote memorization was tedious work, the kind of homework that could mean either “this is a piece so important it’s worth the effort to commit into memory” or “the teacher just wants to assign something to keep the students occupied.” Nonetheless, we existed in a culture where deference to authority was paramount, so we complied.
In ninth grade my class got assigned a new Chinese teacher, Mr. Shi. It was evident how much he loved literature, and how much he wanted to instill that in us. His classes were notably more intensive: aside from covering everything in the textbook, he also taught us Classical Chinese poetry that he appreciated, and required us to memorize them. I really liked his classes; despite the workload I thought I was stepping into a world of literature I didn’t know existed before, learning that the art of language could be even more beautiful than I had known.
One afternoon, as I was biking home from school, I noticed that, instead of humming a song to myself like I often did, the sounds coming out of my mouth were a poem that we analyzed in class a few days prior and got assigned to be memorized. For a moment I found this absurd — was I becoming a stereotypical old Chinese scholar? That would be so uncool! But then I was fascinated. My efforts to recite great works had hitherto been to fulfill some requirements from an authority; in that moment, I realized that what I’d memorized had become mine, in a way.
It was the first instance of a lesson that I’d learn over and over again in life: that what I put effort into would in turn shape me as a person.
The end of ninth grade was the end of middle school in my hometown, and the end of my childhood in China. At the end of that summer, I boarded a one-way flight to Canada with my parents, landing in a place where I did not speak the language well enough to order the correct item at McDonald’s.
Before I left, Mr. Shi gave me a book: The Golden Rose by Konstantin Paustovsky. I tried to read it a few times, but found it confusing at the time, so I just left it on my bookshelf. I moved a lot during my years in Canada, eventually trimming down all of my belongings to two suitcases, and lost the book somewhere along the way.
At the Canadian high school I attended I was never expected to recite anything. I really appreciated the sudden lightening of workload, while I was otherwise still adjusting to the new country. I went for a STEM education in university, where understanding — and thus being able to derive from first principles — was more important than memorizing. My identity crisis set in; reciting great works became a distant memory; the act of recitation was rote, evidence of an oppressive culture that I wanted to reject.
A few years into my professional life, I heard about Anki, a spaced repetition software that people used to memorize things — Unix commands, standard library of programming languages, useful miscellany. I was also given a reason: memorizing something removed the cognitive overhead needed to use it, therefore, freeing up more room for craft and creativity.
As humans we don’t always get to understand, let alone predict, how our decisions influence how things play out over time. The causal chains are too amorphous; the path trees are too enormous. Somehow I found myself at a writer’s retreat, overhearing a new friend reciting something while pacing around. I asked what it was; one of President Lincoln’s speeches, I was told.
I suddenly remembered my ninth grade Chinese classes. I remembered Mr. Shi explaining the art of creating visuals with words, and setting up contrasting visuals to send the message. I remembered analyzing with him, character by character, what each character meant, how they fit the meter and rhyme. I remembered how, before ninth grade, I’d long made up my mind to study science “when I grew up,” but those classes made me wonder if it was possible to tack on some literature.
It occurred to me how fortunate all of this was: that before life propelled me into pragmatically building a new life in a language that I barely spoke, I had committed in my memory, that language could be beautiful, that I could always strive towards beauty, even in my new language.
I tested myself to see if I could still recite the poem that came out of my mouth on that bike ride home. I still could.
