Soldat Tatjana: The magic of paper pages

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.