Ever since my children were small, I have read them many classic stories: Snow White, The Ugly Duckling, Romeo and Juliet, Aesop’s Fables… And gradually, a question began to stay in my mind: Why are they almost all foreign classics? What about the great Chinese classics? Why do Chinese children so rarely grow up immersed in their own literary heritage?

Some people say Chinese classics are simply too difficult for children to understand. Others say the values and ideas within them are outdated and no longer relevant to modern life.

I have always loved classical literature myself. Looking back, the very first Tang poem I learned as a child was Li Bai’s Seeing Off a Friend. I had a good memory, so I memorised the entire poem almost immediately. But from that moment on, I genuinely believed that Li Bai lived in Castle Peak (青山) in Hong Kong’s New Territories… Ha! Ha!

And even now, many primary school parents still dread the school holidays because of assignments like: “Memorise twenty Tang poems.”

It seems that from the past right up to the present, learning the classics has almost always been tied to memorisation. The attitude is often: “Whether you understand it or not, memorise it first. Understanding will come later.” Memorisation itself is not necessarily a bad thing. But memorising without understanding is something else entirely.

Because so many people share painful memories of this experience, some well-meaning educators have even turned Tang poems into nursery songs by adding melodies to them, hoping to make the process less dull. But in truth, that changes very little.

If children still do not understand the meaning, they still do not truly understand.

What I noticed, however, was that the foreign classics children encounter are almost never the original versions. They are adapted editions, illustrated editions, storybook versions. These retellings preserve the spirit and essence of the originals, but present them in language children can actually understand. Because children understand them, they are able to remember them naturally after hearing or reading them only a few times.

Yet when it comes to Chinese classics, children are often given the exact original texts — written in literary Chinese and detached from context and background. Take the famous line: 床前明月光 (“Before my bed, the bright moonlight…”). How would a child naturally know that 床前 simply means “in front of the bed”, or that 明月 means “a bright and shining moon”?

And lines such as 曲項向天歌 (“With curved neck lifted towards the sky, it sings”) are even more abstract. Many children today have never even seen a goose in real life, so naturally they struggle to picture that long curved neck.

It suddenly struck me: we are often incredibly patient when introducing foreign classics to children, yet strangely impatient with our own.

Classics are the memory of a culture. They are treasures of inherited wisdom.

Some ideas within them may indeed belong to another era. But by learning about the past, children gain a deeper understanding of the present. And somehow, this also gives them a greater sense of rootedness and inner stability.

What children truly need is for classical poetry and literature to become more story-based and contextualised — preserving the spirit of the original while reshaping the language into something they can more easily understand.

Over the years, I too have adapted and written classical stories for children: Sima Guang, Cao Chong, Mencius, Cai Wenji… The responses from parents have convinced me even more that as long as these stories are written with children’s understanding in mind, Chinese classics can become just as accessible and engaging as foreign classics.

A line from a song suddenly came to mind: “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Perhaps what we really need to do is simply add a little sugar to the classics for children. That way, little by little, they will happily swallow the medicine themselves.

And with that thought, I suddenly felt that a new mission might be waiting for me in the years ahead.