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Soldat Tatjana: The magic of paper pages

Updated: 2025-04-22 06:45 ( China Daily )
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As a child in Serbia, Soldat Tatjana, now director of the Serbian Cultural Center in Beijing, watched her father read each evening, his fingers tracing lines of text like a sacred ritual. "What magic lay in those pages?" she wondered.

Soon, her parents gifted her illustrated fairy tales. Among them, The Hedgehog's Home — a simple story about a hedgehog defending its burrow — stood out, teaching her patriotism through allegory. "Every book leaves a mark," she says, quoting a sentence Serbian people often say, "even a bad one teaches discernment".

This lesson echoed through her life. At university, Tatjana chose to study Chinese, drawn by Serbia's unexpected cultural similarities with China. Without a Serbian-Chinese dictionary, she decoded characters through a third language, marveling at how words and texts help a society interpret and respond to the world around it through the nuances of its vocabulary.

Books also anchored her during struggles.

Soldat Tatjana [Photo by Wang Jing/China Daily]

Tatjana recalls Nikola Tesla, Serbia's visionary inventor, whose childhood love for history and literature fueled his genius. Like him, she sees books as portals — to science, philosophy, and the quiet resilience of characters like the hedgehog.

Now, amid the frenzy of the digital age, Tatjana champions paper's enduring power. Turning paper pages, inhaling ink-scented air, she finds focus — a tactile ritual no screen can replicate. Reading paper books is a mental training to enhance cognitive functions and strengthen memory retention, she says.

"Its weight in your hands, its scent — these are acts of mindfulness," she says.

While cultivating empathy, reading also serves as a refuge, alleviating stress while nurturing the soul. "Thus, no matter the circumstances, we must never forget the power of reading," she says.

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