I am a public Chinese teacher and now I teach at Confucius University in Malawi, Africa. This is my third year in Africa and my sixth year abroad. Influenced by Meng Wei, she began to read and write this year and became a better person with her.
I remember three years ago, my good friend asked me a question, and she said, "What kind of person do you want to be?"
I clearly remember the answer: "I don't know what kind of person I will be, but I want to live in my own way and choose what I want to do according to my own wishes."
I think this concept of life was obvious when I was eighteen. At that time, my parents who graduated from high school arranged for me to apply for Northwest Normal University. After I promised, I secretly changed my first choice for the college entrance examination to a university in Sanya. Mom ignored me for a week because of this.
With the achievement of going to a key university, I went to a second third-rate college. At that time, from Lanzhou to Sanya, you had to take the bus first, then take the train, transfer to the ferry, and then take the train. It took me 62 hours to get to college, plus the waiting time for connecting flights.
My parents are hardworking farmers who work at sunrise and rest at sunset. Before going to college, I stayed at home every summer vacation, farming with my parents, planting cabbage, eggplant, picking strawberries, breaking corn and fertilizing. I always said to my mother, "If I don't go to college, I will definitely become a capable and profitable farmer."
Because my family's income comes from the fields, I have no money to buy a plane ticket for me. I often can't buy a sleeper when I go home in winter and summer vacations. When I returned to the hard seat, I lost three or four pounds. I once bought a seat, which was the most uncomfortable trip home in my memory.
Every time I go home, my mother asks me if I regret studying so far away. I said I would never regret it, and a sentence popped up in my heart, "But it's so fucking far away."
I have been saving money since college. I want to take my parents to travel to Sanya, and I want to fly home. In this way, relying on family education, I supported myself to go to college, and I had more than 10 thousand deposits in my third year of high school.
When I was in senior three, I bought plane tickets for my parents and younger brother, and realized my little wish to take my parents to travel. On the way to the airport after the trip, my mother said that it was her first time to leave Lanzhou, and I was very happy that I could see the outside world.
In this way, I walked all the way through the university, and my mother asked me to go home and take the civil service exam. I promised her that I would go back as soon as I graduated, but two months before graduation, I set foot on a plane to Thailand. I took the national unified open recruitment examination and became a volunteer in China. I also became the first person in our village to go abroad.
Looking back, I think my three years in Thailand had a great influence on my life. 20 13, working as a Chinese teacher in a key high school in Songkhla, southern Thailand. I was 23 years old, and all my students were high school students aged 15 or 16.
This is my first job after graduating from college. After half a year, I paid off my student loan, with no debt and my own savings. I realized for the first time how happy it is to have a job.
Seriously, when I was in Thailand, I was very busy at work. My school is the Southern Chinese Language Center, with only one China teacher and three Thai native Chinese teachers. We are responsible for organizing and informing the Chinese activities in South China and assisting the Confucius Institute at Prince Songkhla University to carry out Chinese activities.
I think we were both organizers and participants in the endless activities at that time. When there are activities, I attend classes during the day, train students after work, and make activity plans and various forms at home at night. I have been busy until eleven or twelve in the evening, and there is no lunch break. I am exhausted every day.
In the first year of work, I get up at six o'clock every morning and pack my things for work. Get off work at four o'clock in the afternoon and train students at school until six o'clock. When there is no activity, tutor students for HSK exam, and rehearse when there is activity.
In order to teach, I learn paper-cutting, Chinese knots, calligraphy, facial makeup, writing sketches, telling stories, teaching students to talk and sing … I feel omnipotent.
Sometimes I wonder why there is so much work every day and why I have to tutor these children for free. It was not until three students in my senior three successfully passed the exam and applied for study places in Beijing, Shanghai and Sichuan universities. When I watched the students kneeling in front of me with flowers, I thought I might have found a reason to insist.
I have Chinese classes in senior one, senior two and senior three, because I stayed in Thailand for three years just to take them out of school. I took them for three years, starting with hanyu pinyin and passing HSK level 5.
In order to help them study, I learned to listen to and speak Thai myself. I will give them lectures by translating texts every day. By the time I left after graduation, 1 1 of the 85 students in two classes were studying in China, and more than half of them chose to study Chinese in Thai universities.
0 1 Pay attention to the image
As we all know, Thailand is a country that pays great attention to ceremonies, so schools are very strict with teachers. Teachers are required to wear skirts to work every day, and shirts are pressed with sleeves every day. The length of the skirt is below the knee, and the dress must have sleeves, not a low collar. Make-up should be put on every day at work, and young teachers should wear high heels. Clothing colors are required every day, Monday yellow, Tuesday pink, Wednesday green, Thursday purple and Friday blue.
For these reasons, I have also become a person who pays great attention to my image. I know exactly what kind of clothes to wear on any occasion, and it also makes me form the habit of going out with light makeup every day. Every weekend, clothes should be ready for work next week, and shirts and skirts should be ironed.
I think paying attention to external image is the first step for a woman to love herself. This doesn't mean how much you have to spend on clothes and cosmetics, but when you go out and look in the mirror every day, you feel that your image today is very decent.
Tell an episode, once the king had to wear yellow clothes for a month on his birthday, which happened to be a holiday. As a result, the whole school wore yellow clothes on Monday, including the aunt in the canteen and the aunt cleaning. I was the only one wearing a pink skirt, and I was laughed at all morning. Finally, at noon, my colleague sent me home to change clothes.
Exercise regularly
Because I was too busy and stressed, when I was about to collapse, I chose to go to fitness and learn yoga. After working 12 hours every day, I go to the gym alone, and then have dinner by the roadside.
Because of this experience, I have developed a good habit of exercising, and I have been insisting on it until now. When I am under great pressure and depressed, I will use the methods taught by the yoga teacher to relieve it.
Up to now, this habit has persisted for six years, and the benefits it has brought me are really obvious. During my three years in Africa, I have never been sick or put on weight, and my weight has been around 45 kilograms. I have been in Africa for three years now, but my exercise habit has never changed. I go to the gym four or five days a week.
Cultivate the mind
When I was in Thailand, my teacher had a great influence on me. She is a 60-year-old woman with a bright future. She has been teaching Chinese all her life. She said that her father was from China and she was from China. Teaching Chinese is her lifelong dream.
She always told me that we should teach for Chinese, not for anything else. I tutor students at school on weekends, and she will accompany me and buy meals for me and my students at her own expense. She often says, "As long as you are willing to study hard."
During my three years in Thailand, she took me to all the delicious restaurants in my city. On weekends, when she is not busy, she will confiscate my mobile phone, take me to the temple to meditate, listen to monks chanting Buddha, ring the bell, clean the Buddhist temple and eat vegetarian food. After a long time, I feel that my thinking has slowed down and I am not as impetuous as before. I seldom lose my temper these years.
In Thailand, I learned paper-cutting, Chinese knots, calligraphy, dancing, choreographing dances and sketches, training students to make speeches, and most importantly, I learned to accept my impetuosity, cultivate my mind and temper, and learn to smile at strangers on the road, even in China or Africa now.
I once met a former ocean-going anti-Japanese war veteran at the event site. He is in his eighties and is in a wheelchair. But when the national anthem sounded in the venue, he insisted on standing up, saluting and singing the national anthem without our help. I once watched a whole table of 80-and 90-year-old veterans cry while singing the national anthem. I think this is the national spirit.
Maybe my colleagues, relatives and friends around me can't understand my going to Africa. In my second year in Thailand, I became a backbone teacher in the south because of my working ability and performance ability, and I was directly exempted from receiving certificates and awards from outstanding China volunteers.
In the third year, the Hanban office in Thailand informed me to attend an interview with a volunteer management teacher in Thailand, but I refused. I just wanted to change places and see other countries.
Maybe I read too many books by Sanmao. My mind is full of Sahara Desert, Kenya Wildlife Park, Cape of Good Hope, Victoria Falls and Kilimanjaro. I also want to help African children learn Chinese through my own ability.
So I directly applied for resignation. At that time, many people advised me not to leave because my future job was bright and I could stay at the headquarters in Thailand. However, since I have my own ideas, I also want to try, even if I fail.
I left Thailand on March 20 16, and took the National Public Chinese Teacher Recruitment Examination in April. During the interview, my spoken English mixed with Chinese and Thai made the interviewer laugh.
I got the admission notice in May, trained in Zhejiang Normal University for one month in July, and officially started working in Africa in August. Everything feels so smooth, like a dream.
But my mother was angry and ignored me for two weeks, because I promised her to go back to take the civil service exam to get married after leaving Thailand.
Until she knew I was going to Africa, the whole person was cheated, and my father advised me for several days. Although he was very angry with me, when he left, he packed my luggage and stuffed everything I could into the suitcase.
To be honest, when I first arrived in Africa, I was shocked. I knew it was poor, but I didn't know it would be so poor. The capital of a country, urban construction is like a small town in China.
The people here are really dark, like a black charger, and I can't adapt at once. The hardest thing is that I have a psychological cleanliness for food. I imagine that the rice cooked by their black hands can't be eaten, although I know it's only because of the difference of skin color.
I didn't know there would be frequent power cuts and water cuts here. There are no buses, subways or shopping malls. The biggest shopping center is the supermarket. The hospital has no equipment and medicine. The mortality rate of pregnant babies is very high, and many people are infected with HIV.
When I first started school, the principal of the local school told me that if there was a wound on the skin exposed outside my clothes at work, it must be bandaged.
She said that many students were born with HIV, and my first reaction at that time was to feel sorry for them.
During my three years here, I may have seen too many life and death and poverty that I can't imagine. I think my life is easy to be happy, because it is easier to be satisfied after experiencing it, and a small thing can make me very happy.
The African concept of life has a great influence on me. In their minds, as long as they are alive, they should be happy. No matter how poor people are, as long as they go to church to pray on weekends, they will listen to music, dance and watch football games together after weekends.
I seldom see anyone depressed every day. Even the doorman who earns 300 RMB a month is very happy. He is from China, but he is still unhappy with his salary of tens of thousands.
What surprised me even more was that I got a raise in Africa, where I worked for two and a half years. Together with my previous savings in Thailand, at the age of 29, I saved up my first million in my life.
My mother once said that she may never have the opportunity to live in a building again in this life, because she felt that she owed her parents too much company in recent years, so she bought them a house in the town in the name of her parents.
From the first year of work, I saved a pension fund card for my parents, and now there are tens of thousands of dollars in the card. My mother always says that she hasn't seen me much in recent years and hasn't spent the holidays with her parents for seven years.
Life is like this, it is difficult to have it both ways, so I can't stay with them for the dream I pursue, and I can only try my best to let them spend their old age safely.
Parents have a home, and children with a home will feel at ease no matter how far they go.
Filial piety is too early, and life and death are uncertain. Do your best and don't let yourself regret it.
Since working in Africa, I have taken my parents to travel every year when I go home for vacation.
Traveling to a city every year is what I can do now and what I always want to do in the future.
Living alone abroad for six years has given me a different life experience. Even after I am old, I will be moved by my past when I look at photos and words now. I didn't waste my youth.
Life is like a trip. There are touching moments, difficult roads, joy of success and loneliness in the dead of night.
Only you know what it's like, but I want to say that my loneliness and hardship have also made me calm and practical.
Having said that, the above is my life and work experience in the first half of my life. I started from 20 19 for the rest of my life, and now I start reading every day. It is no exaggeration to say that learning to write and writing accounts are all influenced by Meng Wei.
I used to think that I could make money as long as I worked hard, but now I think my previous idea is naive. The real improvement of a person is not to see how much wealth she has, but to have commendable cultivation and knowledge while making money.
A person's life is short. I was very happy to pursue my own life when I was young. At least I have no regrets in my life. Although I had to start all over again after returning to China, I was still young at that time and could start all over again.
Now everyday life is to go to work, read, study and write. I feel that my life is full, I have made progress bit by bit, I have learned more truth and formed more good habits. I hope that life is not only beautiful in front of me, but also poetry and distance.
In the future, I hope to be accompanied by reading and writing every day. At least when I was 50 years old, I was still an old woman who liked reading, not an aunt who only gossiped about her parents and danced in the square dance.
If you have your own dreams, then I hope you can try, even if you do something you have never done before, it is also a kind of self-transcendence.
For the rest of his life. I want to live according to my own wishes. Be a young woman with a story.