This is the kind of letter you can fold into a pocket and read again on a difficult evening, the kind a father writes when he wants his child to remember something. Liang Jizhang’s letter to his son is one of those.
Liang Jizhang (梁繼璋) is a Hong Kong radio host. Some years ago, he sat down and wrote a short, plain-spoken note to his child and titled it 給孩子的備忘錄, “Memo to My Child.” It moved through Chinese-language media, was later featured on Hong Kong’s TVB drama 情常在, and eventually crossed into English readers’ inboxes. People send it to their children. People send it to themselves.
His letter belongs to a tradition older than almost any other in Chinese culture: a father, late in his work or late in his life, sitting down to write his children a letter. Not a will. Not instructions. A letter. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the strategist Zhuge Liang Jizhang wrote his son a letter of just 86 characters on the discipline of stillness. In the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), the official Zeng Guofan wrote nearly 1,500 letters home, building one of the most quoted family archives in Chinese history.
This is Liang Jizhang’s letter, and the man who wrote it.
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