This is the fifth Chinese Year of the Tiger in my life. When it dawned on February 1, I smiled at the thought of the time my mother gave me a fountain pen to practise writing with. Almost a rite of passage, marking the transition from primary to secondary school, from pencils to pens. 

The blue liquid from the new maroon nib pressing across the blank page, spurted the start of William Blake’s “Tyger Tyger, burning bright/In the forests of the night…” That I’d also thrilled to the gallop of what was trochaic tetrameter verse, I picked up in prosody class much after. Then, it was enough being treated to a Chinese meal (unaccustomed indulgence in the early 1970s), for inking those dramatic lines.