16
In 1977, the Chinese government announced the college
entrance exam was resumed. The news made my father
thrilled, because his dream of entering a university was
stopped by the Great Cultural Revolution in 1966. My father
liked studying, especially Chinese culture, Chinese poetry and
writing, and he was the best student with the highest score in
his high school. As a result, my father passed the college
entrance exam without a doubt in 1978. When my family
celebrated my father’s success, my mother found she was
pregnant with me. If you think this was also good news, you
are wrong. At that time, my family was very poor, my parents
were workers in an automobile factory, and they took care of
my older brother by themselves. Although my mother said she
could handle everything by herself, my father firmly threw out
all books supplied by the university and refused to register.
Later, nobody talked about the experience until I went to
middle school.
Before I heard what my father did, I had no idea what it
meant to “contribute”. The word was just a word which often
appeared in stories of national heroes, in the newspaper, and
on TV. However, my father contributed his dream to me, and
he also contributed every one of his days to the family.