Teaching My Mom How to Read
by Huina Zheng
During this winter break, I took my mom for the first time to Guangzhou, the city where I attend university. Walking down bustling Beijing Road, I held her hand as we weaved through the crowds. She walked slowly, stopping at each shop to look up at the signs, trying to recognize the words.
“Guang Bai Bai...” she read aloud. “What’s that last word?”
“It’s Huo, the word for ‘goods’,” I replied.
My mom always says her biggest regret in life is never having gone to school. When I was ten, we moved to a small town in Guangdong Province, and she stayed there, never daring to travel far. “If only I could read,” she would often sigh while I was doing my homework, “then I could understand the street signs.”
If only she had learned to read with me back then, but she had to help my dad run a late-night food stall. At night, when I was at home, it was always the busiest time for her. She was born in rural southern China in the 1970’s, a time when China’s illiteracy rate remained at around 23.5%. She was the eldest daughter in her family, with two younger brothers and one younger sister. Because her family needed help with farm work, she gave to her younger siblings her chance to go to school, but she never complained.
Even when I went to college, my mom was still the same illiterate woman. Last year, during my first-year summer break, she told me that her friend had shopped on the Taobao app, and it was more convenient than shopping in stores, with a wider range of products and better prices. Her friend had finished only three years of school, and my mom thought she could use Taobao, too. She wanted me to teach her how to use these shopping apps.
I thought it would be simple, especially since most shopping apps now support voice search for products. But I quickly realized I had underestimated the task. Even though Mom could compare images, she couldn’t read the product descriptions, discount information or promotions. During the summer, I was working as a tutor during the day. I decided I would teach her at night how to read.
“Are you serious?” my mom asked, a slight pause in her voice.
“Of course,” I said, pointing to the first-grade textbook I had just bought.
“I just need to be able to recognize enough characters to take the bus or order food at a restaurant.”
“No, that’s not enough,” I said. “This way, you’ll be able to read books and understand more things.”
I hoped that after she learned to read, she wouldn’t have to spend her free time scrolling through short videos but could instead do what she had always encouraged me to do when I was little: “Go far and wide, and not spend your whole life stuck in the kitchen.”
According to the teaching syllabus, I started by teaching her the characters in the first unit, assigning her homework every day. But when we got to pinyin, a system using the Latin alphabet to represent the pronunciation of Chinese characters, it felt like a foreign language to her. She couldn’t distinguish between similar vowel sounds like ui, iu, ei, and ie.
I considered skipping pinyin but realized she would need it for typing on cellphones. When faced with characters she couldn’t write, she could use pinyin to represent them. When encountering characters she couldn’t read, she could look them up in a dictionary and sound them out herself with the help of pinyin. This step is a crucial part of literacy and cannot be omitted. So, I kept teaching it, watching online teaching videos, trying to teach her using mnemonic methods, hand gestures, and comparative pinyin exercises, but none of it worked.
When, for the countless times, she read “ei” as “ie,” I blurted out, “Why can’t you learn this after so many repetitions?” The moment I said it, I regretted it. I looked at her, and she forced a smile, but her ears turned red.
“Sorry, Mom,” I said.
“No, no, it’s not your fault. I really am slow,” she replied with that same smile, like the one she gave when customers shouted at her if they found the stir-fried scallops too bland. She smiled to calm them. “I’m getting old...”
Her self-deprecating smile pierced my heart. I pointed at the pinyin, teaching her how to read it again. She didn’t look at me but followed my voice but speaking more loudly. I promised myself I would never get angry at her again, never lose patience.
My mom remained actively engaged in learning, while sometimes I still let my emotions get the best of me. But I quickly calmed myself. I had thought that one summer break would be enough to teach her the first-semester, first-grade Chinese textbook, but by the end of my vacation, she still had two units left.
When school started, since I wasn’t at home, I used my summer earnings to hire a tutor for her, an hour each night. The tutor was a young mother from our neighborhood, a college graduate who had quit her job to stay home and take care of her baby.
I also installed a literacy app for her called Hong’en, so she could practice reading daily. Every night, she would send pictures of her completed homework to me on WeChat. She often sent voice messages about what she had learned that day, her voice carried a pride she had never had before.
During this winter break, I took her on the trip to Guangzhou. By then, she had completed the first-grade Chinese textbook, both volumes. On Beijing Road, although she still didn’t recognize a lot of characters, she was no longer the person who stood in front of a street sign feeling helpless. When I told her that the character was “Huo,” she nodded and read it again, “Guang Bai Bai Huo.” It was slow, but every word was correct. She looked at me, waiting for me to explain.
“Guang Bai is a brand name, and Bai Huo means a store that sells all kinds of things.”
She nodded, but there was still a hint of confusion in her eyes.
When I first learned to read as a child, did I go through this phase too? Maybe I did, but I don’t remember.
After a day of sightseeing, we were both tired when we returned to the hotel. But when I finished showering and came out, I saw my mom sitting at the desk, writing something in a notebook, one stroke at a time. When she noticed I was watching her, she looked up and gave me an embarrassed smile: “I was thinking: this is such an important trip, it would be a shame to forget it.”
She showed me her notebook. Some of the characters she didn’t know, she used pinyin for, and some of the pinyin was wrong. But this was the first time in her life she had written her own words with her own hand. I turned to several pages, all filled with her name, Chen Yingdi, written stroke by stroke, neatly and precisely.
* * *
Looking at these orderly characters, I remembered last summer, the night when I first taught her how to write her own name. It was after I had finished teaching the first unit of the textbook. I had wondered whether I should wait until she learned to write some simpler characters before starting to teach her name.
That evening, I opened the textbook and asked her, “Do you want to learn to write these basic characters first, or do you want to start with your name?”
She looked at the textbook and was silent for a moment. “Could I... learn to write my name first?” Her gaze never left the book.
Her name had many strokes and a complex structure; if she started without any writing experience, she might become frustrated. But then she looked up at me. “I want to write my name first.”
I nodded. I wrote her name on the grid paper. She took it and stared at the characters for a long time. I hesitated for a moment but ultimately decided not to tell her the meaning of her name. Yingdi sounds like “welcoming a younger brother,” meaning her parents hoped that after her, the next child would be a son. Knowing the meaning of her name likely wouldn’t make her any happier.
I taught her how to hold the pen and bought her a grooved pencil, the kind with indentations on each of its three sides, corresponding to the positions of the thumb, index finger, and middle finger. When my mom held the pencil, placing her fingers in the grooves allowed her to quickly find the correct grip.
She took it to heart, carefully copying the characters in her sketchbook. She traced every stroke, her wrist stiff. When she finally wrote her full name, crooked and uneven, she stared at it for a long time, her eyes filled with an emotion I couldn’t describe.
When writing on the grid paper, if a character wasn’t straight, she would erase it and rewrite it over and over again. I told her she didn’t need to make it so neat, but she told me, “Once you develop a bad habit, your writing will always be ugly.” I never imagined she would spend so much time practicing her name again and again. That’s when I truly understood how much heart she put into this.
I remembered when I was in elementary school and had to get my parents to sign my test papers. I always asked our neighbor to help. One time, when the neighbor was away on a trip, the teacher asked me why my parent hadn’t signed it. I stared at the floor and mumbled, “My mom can’t write.”
In third grade, I had a fever at school, and the teacher asked my mom to pick me up. At the school gate, the security guard asked her to sign the leave slip before she could take me. My mom, with her voice trembling, explained that she couldn’t write, and asked if he could make an exception. The guard insisted, and my mom begged for half an hour before he allowed me to sign for her.
I don’t know how my mom felt every time she had to sign something. But now, she can go to the bank, check into a hotel, or do anything that calls for her signature, all by herself, without needing someone to accompany her. She is, at last, her own person.
* * *
While we were looking at her name in the notebook, I looked up at her. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Bad handwriting,” she said, smiling a little sheepishly.
I blinked hard. “No, it’s very good.”
I remembered that, when I was little, she taught me how to use chopsticks and knit sweaters. Now, it was my turn to teach her how to read and take her into a bigger world.
Copyright © 2026 by Huina Zheng
