WHEN THE READING LIGHT WENT ON

Pauline Yu, 50, dean of humanities, UCLA College of Letters and Science. She speaks and reads English, French, German and Chinese:

There was no great epiphany. I have been reading as long as I can remember. I started when I was quite young and I was a voracious reader, to the point where I would read when the light was supposed to be out, with the night light, and my mother would come in and yell at me to put the book away.

It seems to me that one of the real appeals of books came from the fact that I was the oldest child of immigrant parents [from China] and I didn’t speak their language, and I didn’t know the history and culture of the country in which I was born and lived. I grew up in upstate New York, so books created that history and culture for me. I think they play an instrumental role in any child’s construction of the world. We didn’t have that larger extended family structure that orients you and situates you and gives you that history. . . . It was somebody else’s, but it was the world in which I had been inserted.

Reading is something I’ve always found important for my own kids. I have three; they’re all teenagers. . . . It’s always interesting to me, and disturbing, to see how much less time they spend reading than I did when I was their age. I’m sure they’d admit that I’m always on their case about it.