Accept, Affirm, Trust, Encourage, and Wait

The most painful thing for a person is to have his will controlled by another.

—The philosopher Schopenhauer

As my child has grown, I as a father have often asked myself: what kind of family education should I give him so that he will be happy and fulfilled for a lifetime? When I think of this question, the first thing that comes to mind is Schopenhauer's classic line, so I put myself in my child's place and ask what happiness he wants.

I am not a controlling parent, nor an anxiously anxious one. I am prepared to accept all of my son's heartfelt choices. President Carter's mother once said that a son who became president made her proud, and a son who became a farmer made her proud. In a normal, civilized society, people are equal in dignity; whatever my child becomes in future, so long as he does not harm society or others, I am willing to accept him.

Our Chinese ancestors long understood that spiritual self-consistency is the best state for a person to exist in the world. Only when we parents have taken this principle deep into our bones can we joyfully accept everything about our child and be ready for whatever his growth brings.

"Self-consistency" is a philosophical term, unfamiliar to many. Put simply, here it means that, reasoning according to one's own logic, one can prove that one is at least not self-contradictory or mistaken; it is a positive recognition of one's own existence. A person who is spiritually self-consistent suffers no inner split and loses no self-confidence. At my age I am no longer so sensitive to so-called success and failure; if I am myself spiritually self-consistent and can make my way in this society, I consider that enough.

I have almost never, truly and lasting, lost self-confidence, though every day I am on the receiving end of all manner of negation and blows. As a physician who specializes in cancer, I have witnessed more deaths than I can count, but as one lung-cancer patient once told me, almost no difficulty can truly break me.

I often wonder who gave me such resilience and sound self-confidence. For a long time I thought it was simply innate. But only when I thought it through carefully did I realize that it was my father and my teachers' acceptance and affirmation of me that produced this confidence.

My father did not have an easy temper; as a child he often physically punished my brother and me. But whenever someone belittled us two brothers, he showed strong displeasure and told them quite firmly that he believed in his sons and was proud of them. I almost never heard him affirm me to my face, but people around me always told me that in front of others my father spoke highly of his children, and this gave me particular comfort and a sense of security, a constant inner strength behind me.

My father's unconscious acceptance of me has benefited me greatly. Interestingly, the teacher I have loved most in my life was similarly reserved. Unlike my father, he did give me a few words of praise to my face. More often he was sparing of praise, perhaps fearing I would become arrogant. But like my father, when chatting with my shimu and other teachers, he spoke very highly of me. It was precisely his, and other teachers', constant affirmation that built up my strong self-confidence, letting me challenge and surpass my limits again and again.

I have always regarded this teacher as the engineer who shaped my soul. I care deeply about his opinion of me—not only then but now; even after he has passed away, when I make a major decision I will consider whether my choice might bring shame on his name.

He saw both my strengths and my weaknesses, and on each he touched only lightly, yet a few words always struck to the deepest part of my heart.

My teacher practiced wordless teaching that moistened things silently. With foresight he laid the intellectual foundation for the decades to come of my life. Under his guidance, in two years I read works that many people cannot finish in a lifetime. These works ranged widely; my expectation was that I would one day master both Chinese and Western learning and be equally at home in antiquity and the present. He had a large library and continually chose fine works for me to read. I was only sixteen or seventeen, at an age ravenous for knowledge.

I still remember vividly the guidance he gave me. Because of him I read the philosophical essays of Montaigne and Gibran in my youth; enjoyed the freedom of thought in the witty, untrammeled prose of Liu Shahe and Zhuangzi; gained a deep and clear understanding of my own social background through Fei Xiaotong's plain narrative; and savored, in the modern poetry of Zheng Chouyu and Yu Guangzhong, the beauty of the fusion of Chinese modern and classical literature.

He gave a solid humanistic foundation to a science student like me, so much so that many people's first instinct now is that I am an arts person. My literary skill has concealed the excellent grades I achieved in the sciences; in school, in most science subjects I could score full marks or near-full. Under his guidance I formed the habit of writing every day, a habit I have now kept for over twenty years.

He was truly erudite; the seeds he sowed in my heart have, over the twenty-plus years since, grown into great trees. Even today his influence on me has not receded by half. I feel I am still only perfecting myself in the direction he opened up for me; though I now have more knowledge than when I studied with him, the outline of life he drew has not changed much.

One of my classmates once said to another: "Zhou Zhiyuan always praises Teacher L so highly; we studied with him too, but I don't think he's as outstanding as Zhou says." She now teaches herself, and I see nothing wrong with her words, because in my student days I was the recipient of the teacher's special favor. Though all teachers in the world follow the principle of teaching without discrimination and treating every student equally, in reality the affinity between teacher and student varies in depth.

Between teacher and student, as between physician and patient, there is such a thing as affinity. My recognition of my beloved teacher began even before I studied with him. Though he was later named a special-grade teacher, when I studied with him it was his first time teaching high school; he was just beginning in secondary education. I had known him since middle school as the most erudite teacher I knew. I had long hoped one day to be his student, so when I actually became one, my joy was boundless.

And he, too, could sense the deep respect I held for him, so he did pour great care and feeling into me. Only by trusting and respecting a teacher can one gain extraordinary benefit from him; it is the same principle as trusting and respecting a physician enough to receive careful treatment. In the two realms of medicine and education, which concern human life and soul, trust and respect are indispensable, which is why I have always taught my child to honor teachers and the Way from the heart.

A teacher may fulfill the duty of transmitting knowledge to some students, and to others both the duty of transmitting knowledge and of transmitting the Way. Han Yu considered the teacher who does both a true "teacher of men," while the teacher who only transmits knowledge but not the Way is merely a "teacher of texts." But whether a teacher can fulfill both duties depends on both the teacher and the student. Transmitting the "Way" that touches the depths of the soul is an extremely difficult thing, and the student's trust and respect are the foundation on which the teacher transmits it.

Benefiting from the example my father and my teacher set, I have always taken an accepting and affirming attitude toward my son and my students. However dismal their exam results at school, I refuse to negate them. Unlike my father and my teacher, I always express my love, affirmation, and trust to the children directly. I tell them constantly that their defeat is only temporary, and that they will eventually stand out in academic competition.

So my son has always been self-confident; after one failure and another he has always been able to rally his faith in himself and has never lightly given up on himself. When he behaves improperly I criticize him, but I never escalate to a fundamental negation of him. I urge him to correct his missteps, while also telling him that he can grow into an outstanding person. Even if others do not recognize him, I take pride in him. Whatever his ideal and whatever his ultimate achievement, I am ready to accept and appreciate him wholeheartedly, but I require him to work hard and not waste his youth. If for now he cannot overcome his shortcomings, then let him not forget to strive to improve his powers of self-reflection and self-discipline, so that one day he becomes a diligent and excellent person.

I grew up slowly; my teacher and my father must have waited for me for many years, and their wish to see me become an excellent person must never have cooled. But they were so patient that, when I had achieved nothing, they refused to negate me. I have heard from many people the hopes and praises my teacher and father held for me, though they never spoke them to my face; passed on by others, they were no less uplifting.

One year I felt my life was a failure; compared with my former classmates, I was a total loser, and none of the ambitions I had set in school had come true. I told my teacher how I felt, shamefully admitting I had let down his cultivation. My teacher said calmly: "Great talents mature late; you need patience to build up a deep foundation before it bursts forth." Even today I have not reached the late-blooming state my teacher expected; many of my classmates have surpassed me in career and wealth. But my teacher has never abandoned me, always affirming me, and this is a great comfort to me.

If the purpose of my father's and teacher's education was to make me a spiritually self-consistent person, then their education has succeeded. If their purpose was to make me a dazzling, conspicuously successful person, then their efforts were indeed wasted. Both my father and my beloved teacher are still alive; I am glad that they never expected much of my "success" and are satisfied with my present state. For them, as long as I myself am happy, their purpose is fulfilled.

When I myself became a father and a teacher to others, I came to understand this feeling of being an educator. For a long time my son was not outstanding, and his mother always worried he would be mediocre. I always comforted her that on the day the child came into his own, he would surprise us. Even if he never surprises us, we should still love and accept him, and not sow the seeds of negative emotion in his heart. To negate and scold a child with sharp words only leaves a lifelong scar. We should also not be impatient or try to force a seedling to grow by pulling it upward; we must wait, with the greatest patience, for the child to mature.

I have every reason to love my son. I remember when he was four, once walking by the river, I pretended I was about to fall in to tease him; he clutched my hand desperately, crying loudly to save me. When he was seven, my mother died and the company I had invested in went bankrupt, and I was in anguish; my son comforted me, saying: "Dad, when I grow up I will make a lot of money, earn back all the money you lost, so you won't be so sad, and support you in doing what you want, so you never have to worry about making a living." At fifteen, whenever he met a thorny problem, his first thought was that his father would surely understand him. So, emotionally speaking, I am well satisfied with such a son, even though he inevitably sometimes says wounding things to me.

I have always believed that the seeds sown in a child will eventually sprout: seeds of love bear love; seeds of positive expectation bear surprising fruit; seeds of negative expectation bear painful fruit. So I always encourage him with positive words; his mother sometimes even thinks I will make the child arrogant. In fact he has not become arrogant, but when setbacks come, he does show a remarkably resilient side.

I have consistently applied this educational philosophy to influence my child, sometimes even pleading his teachers to give him some positive encouragement. When my son was in middle school, his Chinese grades were for a while not very good. Once I ran into his Chinese teacher on the street and we chatted; I begged her to find a chance to affirm my son's talent in Chinese and let him regain his confidence. The teacher did as I wished and spoke with him, affirming his talent in Chinese; from then on his interest in Chinese rose greatly, and his grades soon climbed.

Few people can study and live actively under the influence of negative emotions. The vast majority of what we learn in school is not used in our work; study, while while improving our overall competence, also trains our ability to learn. Most of the skills a person needs must be relearned on the job. So in the student years, cultivating thinking ability and sound psychological qualities matters far more than the specific content learned.

My understanding of education is this: education is essentially a process of training a child's ability to learn and to cope with all sorts of problems. Our ultimate aim is to foster their ability to learn and live happily, and to promote the growth of their mind. If we impatiently instrumentalize education, carefully calculating how much income each thing learned will later generate, we will surely sacrifice the root for the branch. When, in the course of education, a person has brought his abilities into full play and is meanwhile enjoying the process, he will benefit for a lifetime. His confidence and optimism will be built up in that process, and whatever difficulties he meets in future, he will not lightly shrink back.

Of course, limited by my own understanding, my views on education are only a single narrow perspective and can hardly be called grand. I also cannot guarantee that the child I raise will necessarily become a happy person; verifying whether an educational philosophy is right requires observing the educated person's whole life. But education does have such enormous influence on our descendants that I can only hope I am right.