Tucked away in the more tranquil western part of Peking University is the Russian Building. It is currently home to the School of Chinese as a Second Language, where foreign students take intensive courses in China’s lingua franca and where Deputy Dean Prof. Zhao Yang teaches.
Swimming against the current
Prof. Zhao has a Zen-like feel about him. He articulates his sentences softly but firmly, occasionally punctuating his words with an affable smile. This relaxed demeanor belies a fierce determination that is crucial to bringing him to where he is now.
Born into a poor village family with seven elder sisters, Prof. Zhao graduated from junior high school in 1978 and gave up the chance to do his senior high school studies, a path that would have taken him straight to university. Instead, he trained to be a teacher and assumed his first teaching post, at his alma mater, at the age of 19.
With his sterling junior high school results, which saw him being ranked second in his county, Prof. Zhao was trained as an English teacher. However, despite being a full-time teacher, he never gave up studying English. “I cannot recall a day, in the six years I spent teaching, in which I took a break from studying English,” he confessed. He remains enormously grateful to his friends who would send him English books from the city, allowing him to read voraciously and keep up with them. The effort paid off and he was one of the 12 teachers selected from Hebei to take a BA degree course at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
It was there that Prof. Zhao became aware of how close he was to further his studies. In slightly more than a year’s time, he worked assiduously on his English in order to pass Peking University’s graduate entrance examinations. Apart from having to improve his English at breakneck speed, no mean feat considering he was left in tears after not understanding his first English lesson at the university, he also had to master a second foreign language from scratch. He chose to self-study French.
When there’s a will there’s a way. Prof. Zhao formally became a graduate student at Peking University in 1992 and stayed on as a teacher upon graduation in 1995. In 2000, he was awarded the China-Cambridge Scholarship and left to pursue a PhD in the UK. He returned in 2005 and has since taught at the School of Chinese as a Second Language.
Tolerant and critical; read and walk
Having furthered his education in Cambridge, UK, Prof. Zhao’s greatest takeaway there is part of the lesson that he hopes to impart to students. “I learnt to be both tolerant and critical,” he explained.
While the two attributes seem contradictory, Prof. Zhao reveals their connection, “When I was in Cambridge, I got to see more of the world. Seeing different people and their cultures helped me appreciate diversity. In such an environment, you realize that your life is a life and not the life. Your life is only one way of living – there are many others, and you have to respect their right to lead their lives differently. It is the same with viewpoints – what you think is only a viewpoint; there are many others out there. Hence, I learnt to be critical on the basis of tolerance.”
“When you read only one book on a certain topic, you are controlled by the author. Yet, when you read two or more books, the different viewpoints you encounter spark off questions in you – that’s when you become critical,” Prof. Zhao likened the process of tolerance and critique to that of doing a literature review.
The second lesson is “read and walk.” Prof. Zhao constantly reminds his students that there are perhaps only two things they need to do at this point of their lives – read avidly and study hard, while seeing more of the world whilst they can. He believes that engaging in the two will prove significant in students understanding more about themselves and about life.
Most importantly, Prof. Zhao prefers to take away the barriers that a traditional student-teacher relationship has. He makes it clear that he would want to be both their friend and teacher, and that they should feel free to approach him should they encounter any problems. He is not the stern and distant professor, but the amiable and approachable one who brings his camera to take photos of Christmas celebrations and who gamely poses for photos.
When asked about his willingness to go the extra mile, a simple answer was given, “It is important that students feel they can talk freely with you. Sometimes, just the process of confiding to another person is sufficient to resolve the problem. If not, confiding lets the listener offer advice, though ultimately the student is the one who chooses the next course of action.”
The art of comparison
As a young man growing up in a village, Prof. Zhao candidly admitted to somewhat of an inferiority complex. He would compare himself with classmates who entered university and with urban dwellers, coming away with a nagging sense of inadequacy. This thankfully was changed in one incident.
Up till when he began teaching as a 19-year-old, Prof. Zhao had never done public speaking. Once, former classmates who were now in university returned to his alma mater and were invited to speak to their juniors. One class they went into happened to be his class. Listening while his peers spoke about the exciting university life and the importance of diligence to do well in university entrance exams, he was overwhelmed by the almost imperceptible yet certain difference that now separated them.
Standing up, Prof. Zhao wrote the Chinese words for “Success = Ability + Opportunity” on the blackboard. He spoke at length, sharing with his students how their university seniors were from the same cohort as him, and how by a simple difference in choice, there was now a gap between them in terms of influence and status. To succeed was not just a matter of diligence. It was also about seizing the opportunity when it arose. He spoke without a script and was amazed by the logic and conciseness of his own words.
The rush of applause that followed gave Prof. Zhao the confidence he needed in his own public speaking ability. He entered the next public speaking competition and emerged champion. He then went on to encourage his students who had the same inferiority complex as he did.
“In life, there will always be people better than you and people worse off than you. It is with whom you compare and how you compare that makes the difference,” Prof. Zhao regularly gives such advice to his students. “It is good to acknowledge that someone is better than you, but remember, there will be an aspect where you are better than him. There is no need to exaggerate someone’s strengths such that you end up feeling really lousy,” he espouses humble confidence to his students, noting that conceitedness is not the way to go either.
Seeking and living in harmony
Prof. Zhao’s emphasis on achieving “an ordinary man’s happiness” is thought-provoking. For him, such a form of happiness comes through the harmonious marriage of the individual and his surroundings. Prof. Zhao leads by example, starting from the small things in everyday life such as being environmentally-friendly and being thrifty.
“When I dine out, I request that we order one dish for each person and a soup – nothing more. When the host insists on ordering more to demonstrate his respect for me, I decline politely because moderation is the highest form of respect he could give me,” Prof. Zhao revealed, going on to share how he meticulously finishes every grain of rice. It is not about the cost of the rice, but rather the act of appreciating every grain for the hard work in the fields that was behind its production. It is also about appreciating how fortunate we are when many others are starving in other parts of the world.
“Not everyone has the sort of influence Deng Xiaoping had,” Prof. Zhao acknowledges readily, “Yet, we can all start small. It is when we live a simple life by example that we gradually touch the hearts of those around us, and the circle of influence will expand, slowly but surely, such that we help make our world a more pleasant place to live in.”
Written by Lim Ruo Shuang
