How was my soul hollowed out?

(Baonghean) -I still remember clearly the first comic book I owned. It was a Doraemon short story (volume 30 if my memory is not too outdated) bought at a tiny stationery bookstore in the middle of the old Nga Sau market.

At that time, I was 6 years old, preparing to enter first grade and to “celebrate” the fact that I could read (I learned it myself, not because my parents forced me to, thinking back I was really stupid since I was little), my grandmother took me to the market. For the first time, I didn’t have to follow behind to watch her buy and sell, but I was the one who chose the book and she followed behind (to pay, of course). It sounds grand, but in fact, she only bought me one book, and it wasn’t that expensive. But firsts are always important and no matter how small, you can never forget.

I went to school. As a matter of course, my bookshelf was full with the amount of knowledge I was crammed, oh, I forgot, enriched. As a typical bookworm student (well, in more than ten years of schooling, I have never lost my certificate of excellence and some thin and ugly notebooks as gifts), my bookshelf was also quite academic and scientific, no joke. There were books like Please answer me why, Sir, why is that so, 375 science experiments for children (of which I did about ten), and also Sans Famille, Fierce Childhood, Trang's stories,... in general, it was a great comprehensive review of martial arts.

Comics are still a powerful invader in the book collection, with almost all the titles that children of today love (Doraemon, Detective Conan, Queen of Egypt, Super Naughty Teppi, Dragon Ball,...). Fortunately, my parents do not discriminate against comics like many other parents, although every parent knows that children who do not like comic books are crazy, but knowing that and still banning them is painful? So while my friends secretly skipped breakfast to read comics in the comic shops in front of the school gate, I was lying on the bed, fan running at full speed, eating snacks and reading comics under the loving supervision of my parents.

The fierce and heroic childhood is now far away. Sometimes when thinking back, I still feel a surge of nostalgia and affectionate gratitude for the classic comic book characters that every child knows, which have blown up my imagination like balloons fluttering in the dreamy sky of memories. How could I have gone through my childhood without once wishing for the robotic cat Doraemon to appear from the desk drawer to help me do my homework, ride the somersault cloud with the little monkey Son-goku and eat magic beans to become extraordinarily strong, or get involved in mysterious and thrilling cases with Co-nan and the group of junior detectives of class 1B?

Many people think that comics have no educational value and humanity, because the content is not realistic and the language in comics is too simple, but in fact, when the target audience of comics is children, is it too harsh and academic? If children carry five or six kilos of books to school every day, study extra classes morning and night, but when they are entertained, their minds must be as tense as a guitar string, then that is unscientific and uneducational.

After a stressful day at work, adults still have to seek entertainment that is more or less fun, but how much educational value is there in drinking, shopping, chatting, watching football, watching TV? Not to mention that mainstream comics all carry humane messages, guiding children to good things, leading their imagination and creativity to fly high and far, so the notion that reading comics is useless is not really accurate and is imposing.

It is not natural that Vietnamese children in particular and children all over the world in general are fond of comics, nor is it without reason that Japanese comics have become a typical feature of an entire culture. Of course, it cannot be denied that the comic market is still rampant, many titles have content that is not really suitable for children, but because of that, it is too one-sided to equate comics with being banned. Is that view too one-sided? Because what our children are exposed to needs to be filtered and monitored, so parents need to be there to follow and guide their every step. But that does not mean infecting and imposing on them the harsh notions of adults such as "Comics are worms that eat away at the soul" so that they are covered up, stereotyped and have a childhood unlike their friends.

Just like the time when our parents were engrossed in playing marbles and marbles and ended up being beaten to death by their grandparents, our grandparents forbade us from beating them, but ask our parents, has anyone ever run away from home to play (even after receiving a beating that was half-death)? So if in the past, parents had a childhood that was "eroded" by marbles and marbles and were beaten, and then grew up to be good children, then why not let the "worm" of comics "erode" our children's childhood? Because if the worm is fat, the vegetables will be delicious, right?

Hai Trieu (Email from Paris)