Listening to the Rain in My Study, Remembering My Teachers' Grace

On Teachers' Day, the autumn rain fell continuously. Having finished my work, I sat in my study, listening to the sound of rain outside the window, now faint, now clear, recalling fragments of past years related to my teachers' kindness, my heart filled with gratitude and joy.

I was naughty by nature, and country boys in those days were bold. When I first started primary school, I would sometimes catch a large snake on the hill and bring it into the classroom to frighten the girls; sometimes I would go to the woods outside the village to take bird chicks from their nests, catch a fledgling and bring it to school, where a group of equally mischievous boys would keep it as a pet and dig up earthworms to feed it.

I also once invented an earth-pit heating method. In our Hubei there was no central heating in winter, and in the countryside there was even less way to keep warm. The school was poor and could not afford glass; the classroom windows were sealed with plastic bags or woven sacks that had held chemical fertilizer. In winter, the wind blew in through them and it was very cold.

Our classroom did not have a cement floor either but an ordinary earthen one. I dug a small pit under my own desk and covered it with a small wooden lid made of a board. Before class I would put some charcoal and rice husk into the pit—things that could burn with little smoke—light it, put the lid on, and rest my feet on it to keep warm. Before long, several grades across the whole school followed suit, with the result that the classrooms all over the school were dug full of pits and holes.

At that time I was also obsessed with digging wells. Behind our school there was a small hillside; by chance I dug a small well that seeped groundwater out with a stick, and then I became endlessly fond of this. Every day during recess or after school I loved to run there and dig wells.

This was far more interesting than tedious studying, so before long many classmates followed me, and the small hillside behind the school was also dug full of pits and holes by us. Later we even dug open an abandoned biogas pit that had been sealed shut for who knows how many years.

That is how naughty and mischievous I was as a child, and my studies were a complete mess. My parents had no confidence in my future at all and pinned all their hopes on my older brother. My brother always came first in exams, while my grades were always at the bottom of the class. My father at the time thought I would end up making a living by fishing and catching eels—there were people in our area who did exactly that for a living.

The teachers at the village primary school were mostly elders from our own village, and one who taught me Chinese was even my uncle by marriage (my second aunt's husband). What the parents in our village often said to the teachers was: "The children are naughty. If they are disobedient at school, you teachers should beat them; we won't blame you."

Punitive education was extremely common in the village primary schools of my day. My primary-school head teacher once beat me with the ruler, pulled my eyebrows, placed a stool on the classroom desk and made me kneel on it until I submitted. But I was extraordinarily stubborn and was not afraid no matter how long I knelt. When class was over, students from the whole school would come to watch me being punished.

By today's educational philosophy, such rough education should drive children to develop psychological problems. But I remember that I was not the only one punished this way; my childhood friends and I were all quite mentally healthy, and we never held grudges against our teachers. Perhaps we had adapted to that environment of a country school.

My first teachers also had little confidence in my future. They thought that of the two brothers, one would surely become a learned scholar and the other a good-for-nothing drifter.

But when I was in the third or fourth grade of primary school (I can no longer remember exactly which year), an essay I wrote was once seen by a teacher from our township education station. He read my essay with a special appreciation and said that this student was a rare, promising talent.

I was greatly encouraged and suddenly realized that I was not actually good for nothing. From then on my grades improved by leaps and bounds; in just a few months I jumped from the bottom of the class to first place, and I also changed from an extraordinarily wayward child into a highly motivated person.

A good teacher is like a lamp; he can light up our life.

My first teachers were all kind-hearted country teachers, and they were actually not bad to me. Although I was naughty and troublesome, I was probably not too bad a person at heart, so the teachers were only exasperated by my mischief and never doubted my character. I grew up over six years of primary school under the education of these first teachers.

After I graduated from primary school, my father, who had always valued education, refused to let me attend the junior high school in our village. He sent me to a junior high school twenty li from home that had a good academic atmosphere.

I was very attached to home. On my first day of junior high, after the evening self-study, I crossed mountains and hills and passed through many graveyards to walk home. I banged on the door at midnight; my parents were startled and felt a deep after-fright. My mother's tears came out; she felt so sorry for her son and wanted to transfer me back to the village junior high.

But when it came to educating the children, my father had always been the absolute decision-maker, and my mother had no say. In the end I still had to yield to my father's authority and went back to school early the next morning.

During the three years I spent in junior high, among the teachers I met there were those who liked me and those who did not, but all the teachers in our area conscientiously and responsibly educated us.

My three years of junior high could be described as eventful. I set myself lofty ambitions, wanting to become a great person. I became president of the school student union and class monitor, my grades were so-so, and I was selected as an Olympiad contestant; I had hardly any holidays on weekends because I had to attend the Olympiad training camp arranged by the school. This kind of training ran through almost my entire middle-school years, so that I completely adapted to a life without holidays, and I still do to this day.

After the first month or so, I adapted to school life. Every one of my teachers was wonderful; they really treated the students as their own children. I remember once I had a fever at school and stayed in bed in the dormitory for a few days. Teacher Tu, who taught me Chinese, would visit me in the dormitory three to five times every day, supervise me taking my medicine, and fetch hot water for me from the washroom.

I liked and respected every one of my teachers, even though an individual teacher did not like me—indeed, seeing me gave him a headache—because I was sometimes simply too mischievous.

At that time we were all very greedy for good food. The students at school were generally all sons of peasant families like me, and everyone ate and dressed about the same. To save money, we all brought various pickled dishes from home to eat with our rice at school. Although a dish in the cafeteria cost only ten to twenty cents, we still could not afford it.

For most of each week we ate all kinds of pickled vegetables. When we had a craving for something tasty, a few of us close childhood friends would sneak vegetables to eat together. When my head teacher found out about this, he was very angry. He not only removed me from my post as class monitor but, at a class meeting, donated ten cents to me and called on everyone to donate money so I could buy vegetables to eat. To me this was simply a humiliating disgrace, but many years later I came to understand his loving care. In this way he cured my problem once and for all; from then on I never did anything like it again.

A person's growth requires not only someone who cares for and looks after them, but also someone who dares to take responsibility and correct our bad habits and behavior. Those teachers who shoulder the responsibility of transmitting the Way and teaching the profession—regardless of the way they promote our growth—are all worthy of our lifelong gratitude.

When I reached high school, my two head teachers and the subject teachers taught me a great deal, and I also rose to the occasion; for a time my exam scores ranked at the very top of the whole province. I believe my high-school years were the period that influenced my life the most; even now I still maintain the daily routine habits I formed in high school.

In high school I met the teacher who influenced my life most profoundly. He taught me Chinese, and his educational style was "moistening things silently and gently." He almost never lectured me on grand principles on his own initiative; he simply observed me quietly and constantly provided me with all kinds of books according to what my growth needed. Occasionally, when he felt he should give me a pointer, he always refined his words to just one or two sentences, leaving me to think things through for myself. My horizons were greatly broadened by this teacher; he made me truly feel the joy of seeking knowledge and I still retain my enthusiasm for learning to this day. He made me understand that learning is the most fascinating thing in this world.

It was also during high school that several of my teachers silently taught me how to conduct myself through words and deeds.

At that time I still had to attend Olympiad training camps; other classmates had winter and summer vacations, but my vacations were basically all spent at the training camps. During the holidays the school cafeteria was closed, so I ate at my chemistry teacher's home for an entire summer vacation, and his wife always did her best to cook delicious food for me. I gave the teacher my meal money, and he accepted it; but when the vacation ended, he returned it all to me.

The teacher told me that at the beginning he had accepted it because he was afraid I would not feel at ease eating otherwise. But when the vacation ended he insisted that I take the money back; he believed this was the proper friendship between teacher and student. The teacher's words moved me deeply. They raised me with affection and righteousness; how would I dare fail to live up to my teachers' cultivation of me?

Once, two grades at our school got into a mass brawl. My physics teacher thought I had the greatest influence among the students and the ability to stop this vicious fight. He asked me to step forward, on behalf of our grade, to apologize to the other grade and prevent our grade's students from fighting again, putting an end to this vicious collective brawl.

At the time I was very reluctant, but my teacher invited me to his home for a meal and, at the dinner table, told me that a person must take responsibility—even if it means setting aside one's pride and enduring certain misunderstandings and humiliations, one must still bear one's responsibility. In the end I was moved by my teacher's words and did as he said. I became a "coward" and a "traitor" in my classmates' eyes, and I stopped the brawl.

Years later, I am deeply grateful to my physics teacher for making me learn to be a responsible and broad-minded person.

My university years were the most depressed period of my student life. Poverty, psychological problems from adolescence, and disappointment with my college entrance examination results left me living in dissipation. This was a low point in my life.

My university teachers were made quite unhappy by me. I always wanted to escape from school, constantly made all kinds of excuses, was very dishonest, and was unpleasant. I was sick of school and in low spirits.

Later I applied to drop out, but my kind counselor still managed to keep my student status and converted my withdrawal into a leave of absence; only in the end did I still firmly drop out. After dropping out I felt as if I had escaped from a cage; at last I could choose my own life direction according to my own will, and I went to study medicine.

I did not stay at university for long, and my university teachers did not have nearly as deep a contact with me as my middle-school teachers. My university teachers may at one point have thought I was a student of bad conduct, because I was always doing many strange things and even carried a dagger with me, always wanting to commit suicide. But even so, they still tried every way to help me. Looking back now, this was my delayed adolescent reaction that erupted a few years late.

Recalling my own process of growth, I am grateful from the bottom of my heart to every one of my teachers.

It is precisely because they educated me, whether with warmth, with a sudden wake-up call, or by making clear the great principles of how to study and how to be a person, and did not give up on me despite my waywardness, that I was able to transform from such a recalcitrant state into the person I am today.

It is also precisely because of this group of educators that we country children were able to walk out of the mountain valleys. China has made rapid advances over these years; to be honest, those who have contributed the most are this group of quietly cultivating educators—it is they who have trained a large number of talented people for the country.

My son is now growing up under the education of another group of teachers, and I also sincerely thank his teachers for helping him. The child has been making rapid progress this past school year and has rather lofty aspirations of his own; I am genuinely happy for him and sincerely grateful to his teachers for their cultivation of him.

I myself am now also educating others, and am learning from my teachers how to be a qualified "teacher," not daring to mislead the children entrusted to me. If possible, I hope that in five to ten years I can stand on a larger platform to educate more people, selflessly passing on the skills I have learned to my students and growing together with them.