Father and I.
Growing up, I didn’t realize my dad was teaching me how to become a historian. I just thought he had a peculiar obsession with dusty books, ancient poems, and scribbling cryptic notes in margins like a literary detective. His nightstand was stacked with thread-bound volumes filled with stern-looking men in robes—poets and thinkers whose names I couldn’t pronounce yet. Before I even entered primary school, I could recite Tang poetry like a mini scholar, thanks to the man who once told me that Du Fu “had a heart big enough to shelter the whole world.”
But my father wasn’t loud about lessons. He never preached; he just lived them. He wore his admiration for Lu Xun—China’s most unflinching modern writer—on his sleeve, literally. His haircut, posture, even the stoic stare he gave me when I messed up, all said: “Be better. Think deeper. Say something meaningful.” Sometimes, he would strike a Lu Xun pose so I could sketch him—his silent way of reminding me that history isn’t in books alone; it’s alive in us.
Throughout my school years, my dad handcrafted tiny notebooks filled with quotes, verses, and moral reflections. He expected me to carry them in my pocket like a compass. “Read them. Memorize them. Let them shape you,” he’d say. So I did. And when I started topping the class in writing, it wasn’t because I was naturally gifted. It was because someone, quietly, deliberately, had been chiseling that ability into me.
There’s a line from a movie my dad and I once watched: “In this shit life, you must chop something.” He laughed, then nodded. I think he agreed. In a world full of noise, he taught me what to cut away and what to keep: books, integrity, empathy, craft.
My father may never win awards or write books, but he built the foundation for everything I hope to become. If I ever write history, he’ll be the footnote I repeat the most—quiet, essential, and profoundly human.