Collecting Classical Poetry

Chinese poetry was sung to me since birth, I imagine it was since birth though I don’t remember anything about my infancy except what others have told me. I do have many photographs of myself almost from birth though, as I was the youngest of maybe five children, as far as I know, my mother never talked about any others except one feels there may have been more because of the intense empathy she expressed about women who had to undergo abortion or when she talks about children lost, either in the womb or outside, during war times, particularly the war-torn period she lived through as a young woman. The only dead sibling I knew of when I was growing up was the baby boy whose name I almost inherited until my grandfather intervened and gave me a girl’s name instead. In writing about her, I also started collecting the classical poetry I absorbed from her and later studied and translated after I left the British colony of Hong Kong, (returned to China in 1997).