Authors

Today I went to the library to pick up some books, one of which is John Updike's My Father's Tears & Other Stories. The title immediately caught my attention considering how my life has been revolving round my own father in recent years. So i read the short story My Father's Tears and straight away it reminded me of chinese author 朱自清's 《背影》 - a short story with a scene of how the author's father saw him off at the train platform when he in his youth was bound for beijing for further studies. Likewise, My Father's Tears also began with a similar scenario of Updike's father seeing him off at the train platform as the 18-year old him prepared to leave for Harvard U.

John Updike 朱自清

There was a line from My Father's Tears which played back in my mind for quite a bit on my way home from the library:

'It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.'

When Updike Snr. shook his son's hand on the station platform, his eyes glittered with tears. And this threw his son off track for they had never had occasion for such social gesture in the 18 years of John Updike's youth. Such is the manly contact between a father and his son.

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