Post-70s generation, not reading.

In 2011, Liu Yu gave a speech about her journey of learning and thinking. Later, this speech was summarized into a written piece, which is very engaging. (For details, see "Liu Yu: My Reading Journey.")

At the beginning of this summary text, Li Min from Huxiu wrote a passage:

Liu Yu's stages of reading vividly outline the intellectual journey of the post-70s generation: growing up in a state of confusion and emptiness, then suddenly realizing the world is like this, and finally, without the guidance of masters, sniffing around on their own, reading wherever they go, and understanding whatever they can as their own fortune.

Very well done.

Liu Yu studied liberal arts and started university in the early 1990s, with a touch of the late 1980s still lingering. I entered university three years later than her and pursued science, so if Liu Yu’s experience was a blank slate, mine could only be described as a stark, pale void.

She said that back in high school, the only books she read were exercise workbooks. She hadn’t even read the Four Great Classical Novels, let alone martial arts or romance novels. As a result, when she got to college, her classmates thought she had just returned from abroad.

I'm dying laughing at this part. Because I'm pretty much the same.

I remember back at Tsinghua, there was a very artsy senior who came to do a reading survey, asking everyone what books they read and how much time they spent reading. At the time, I was preparing for the GRE, and I shamelessly asked, "Does GRE reading count?" Because that was the only thing I had time to read.

Actually, for GRE reading, there's no real "reading" involved—it's all about mastering the tricks for answering the questions.

Thinking back to that literary-minded senior from those days, I still feel embarrassed for him. Poor guy, he thought getting into Tsinghua meant you were cultured. I don’t know about others, but I certainly wasn’t. Over time, I came to understand more and more that being good at studying and being cultured are two entirely different things. Those who get into Tsinghua are definitely exam aces, but whether they’re true readers is another story. At least, I wasn’t.

However, Liu Yu said, "Actually, saying it's a blank slate isn't accurate; it should be described as a negative." (Describing that era as a "blank slate" is a form of embellishment, because "blank" implies that at least you haven't been "poisoned." Why is that? Click the link to find out for yourself.)

I've fallen even deeper into this mindset. For many years, I didn't see it as a flaw but rather took pride in it. I believed that reading books outside the curriculum, especially those on topics like history, philosophy, and critical thinking, was not only useless but also a waste of time. I thought memorizing what was in the history textbooks was enough to pass exams. After all, isn't it said that "with a strong foundation in math and science, you can go anywhere"? Why would I need to read those other books?

Later, I discovered that many people in science and engineering fields are quite similar to me. Even if they attend prestigious universities abroad, earn a doctorate, or become professors, they only delve deeper into their own specialized areas, lacking a broad general education. For people like us, there’s a fitting description: highly educated, yet uncultured.

If there was any glimmer of light in those years, it was when I was in middle school and rummaged through my mother's books, reading *The Lady of the Camellias* and *The Red and the Black*. I don't remember how I found these two books under the cabinet of the desk at home, but I do remember sitting on the floor beside the desk one afternoon and finishing *The Lady of the Camellias*.

Back then, I was a "good student," but honestly, I had no real affection for studying, especially when it came to words.

How devoid of emotion is it?

In elementary school, my teacher sent me to participate in a writing competition. The competition was held in a classroom, where a colorful picture of spring was hung on the blackboard for us to write about. I remember it clearly—the first sentence I wrote was: "Today, I came to participate in the writing competition." I didn’t see anything wrong with it until after the "competition" ended. A classmate who went with me asked how I started my essay. I confidently told him my opening line and then asked, "What about you?" He said, "The first paragraph of my essay was four words: 'In the warmth of March.'"

I just learned that I shouldn't start with "I'm here today to participate in the essay competition."

You laughed, right? Yeah, exactly. In today's terms, it was beyond awkward.

But that day when I read *La Dame aux Camélias*, I followed the story and cried uncontrollably by the end. It was the first time in my life I shed tears while reading a book, and I still remember the corner of the small room where I sat on the floor reading. It was the first time I felt the power of words—a tiny glimmer of light in that era of cultural barrenness. Last year, when I read Xu Xiao’s *Half a Life as a Person*, I cried several times, weeping loudly. I truly felt the deepest pain and helplessness conveyed by good writing—it pierces straight through the heart.

The last time I shed tears was while reading a children's book called *The One and Only Ivan*. The book is written for children and tells the story of a gorilla who has been confined for 27 years. The entire book is composed of very short sentences, yet the story it builds is rich in layers and deeply touching. The despair and oppression hidden beneath the surface humor and lightness, the themes of confinement, pain, death, and hope—all of these are constructed through one short sentence after another. By the end, I was completely in tears. I never expected that a book written for children could have such a penetrating impact with its words.

Getting off track, these are all things to be discussed later.

Returning to my history of not reading, the above is the first stage: "I came here today to participate in the essay competition."

Graduated from Tsinghua University and went to the US for a PhD, read many papers, improved English proficiency a lot, and wrote quite a few papers. But spending every day in the lab, aside from conducting experiments and reading literature, there's no time for anything else. Being so busy, there's also no time to read books. Continuing to have academic qualifications but lacking cultural depth.

Later at McKinsey, I read many internal "PDs," which are industry documents, looking at data and overviews of various industries. I felt like I had gained a lot of knowledge. All sorts of numbers, comparisons, and industry development histories—I could talk about them with confidence. And at that time, I also started to become arrogant, thinking that since I was doing such high-level work, the knowledge I gained must be more advanced than what was in books, making it seem even less necessary to read. Moreover, understanding the world through PowerPoint, with pie charts one moment and bar charts the next, felt much more efficient and intuitive.

Not only do I understand the world through PowerPoint, but I’ve slowly realized that I can only speak when I have a PowerPoint in front of me. When I go to a meeting, how can I even start or know what to say without a PowerPoint?

Back then, to secure projects, we had to participate in competitive bidding and often prepared 100-page PPT proposals to "impress" clients. During meetings, there was a set routine for what each section of the proposal should cover. Once, after we finished presenting our PPT and left the room, a local consulting firm came in. They displayed just one slide, and the partner spoke confidently for an entire hour.

I was completely stunned at that moment. On one hand, I felt I had enough reason to scoff at this "unprofessional" approach, but on the other hand, deep down, I thought: Wow, that's amazing. This skill is truly impressive. Without a PowerPoint, I wouldn’t know what to talk about even if given an hour. I need to regain this ability—to speak without relying on the crutch of a PPT. I eventually mastered it, but that’s a story for another time. I’ll share it with everyone when the opportunity arises.

The light of this phase actually has nothing to do with business; it's about the people I met at McKinsey and their stories. The partner training I attended in 2013 introduced me to a senior partner whose two children both passed away from cancer around the age of nine. Looking at him, you would never have guessed he had endured such a profound, dark tragedy in his life. And when he shared these experiences, he never cried. He said his daughter had always loved to laugh during her lifetime, so he decided to bring her laughter to the world. As he spoke about these memories from the stage, all the colleagues below were sobbing uncontrollably. Several grown men cried the loudest. The sound of weeping that night is unforgettable.

I entered the public welfare sector in 2015. To better understand this field, I learned that the top scholar in this area was Ms. Zi. After reading her books, I discovered that she was not originally a researcher in public welfare but had served as the director of the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. However, while studying the United States, she recognized the significant role of philanthropy in social development and conducted related research. She authored several books on the subject and became one of the few experts in the field of public welfare and philanthropy. It was through her book *Twentieth-Century America* that I truly embarked on my reading journey. Looking back now, it feels like it was only a few years ago.

Later, because of my involvement in One Earth Education, I started reading Tao Xingzhi and learning about the educational practices of overseas-educated intellectuals from a century ago. Initially, I approached it as historical reading, thinking it was just stories from a hundred years ago. But as I read, I realized that those short essays weren’t just about history—they were clearly about the present. That era seemed like an old society with a struggling populace, yet many of the accounts now seem enviable.

A Brief Account of "The Six-Month-Old Yanzi Ji National School," written in 1924, contains several short stories about the school, each vivid and endearing, brimming with the admirable and delightful spirit of an educational environment created by a grassroots educator. One of the stories tells of Principal Ding running the school in a Guan Yu Temple, collaborating with students and local villagers to resolve the issue of school facilities.

Principal Ding then began to work together with the teachers and students to transform the school and its environment. The school was located in a temple dedicated to Lord Guan. In addition to the statue of Lord Guan, there were also statues of the God of Smallpox, the God of Measles, and others. These statues had already taken up more than half of the classroom space.

Principal Ding, on one hand, needed to make the classroom suitable for teaching, and on the other hand, had to avoid local opposition. So, he devised a plan to preserve Lord Guan while relocating the miscellaneous deities. He led the students in performing a consecration ceremony for Lord Guan. They scrubbed the statue and its pedestal until they looked brand new, and then he guided the students in respectfully bowing to Lord Guan. After that, he and the teachers moved the statues of the miscellaneous deities to the neighboring temple, arranging them there. They also cleaned that temple thoroughly, placing the miscellaneous deities in an orderly manner, and everyone bowed to them as well.

After the miscellaneous deities were moved out, the classroom was thoroughly cleaned and sprinkled with some lime powder, transforming it into a very practical space. When the villagers saw that the statue of Guan Gong had been consecrated, the miscellaneous deities had been properly arranged, and they heard the students’ reports about paying respects to the deities, they not only refrained from blaming the principal but even praised him for his competence.

At that time, we were struggling to find a suitable venue for the school. Reading this passage made me think that even if we could find a temple like this today, it would be absolutely impossible to set up a school there.

Beijing's Tadpole Practical School, before its closure, aimed to serve the children of migrant workers in Beijing who were of middle school age, cultivating "precious ordinary people" for society. All the instructors were volunteers, willingly coming to teach. I imagine that if Tao Xingzhi were still alive and knew what they were doing, he would have been very fond of it and would have written an article about it. When the school first started enrolling students, the team posted advertisements with phone numbers on utility poles in the urban villages. After waiting for two days, someone finally called, but it wasn’t a student’s parent—it was a city management officer, who said over the phone, "If you keep posting these, you’ll be in trouble!" If Tao Xingzhi were still alive, I wonder what he would have thought.

Starting from the line of Tao Xingzhi, we can understand the people of that era. Tao Xingzhi studied education at Columbia University, and Hu Shi was also at Columbia University at the same time. In Philadelphia, there were Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng. We all seem familiar with Lin and Liang, but only by truly reading do we realize that what we see in the mass media is merely a very narrow fragment of their life journeys. From the 1950s to the 1970s, what Liang Sicheng experienced is only mentioned in fragments, yet that was a full twenty years. Wilma Canon Fairbank wrote an English book titled *Liang and Lin*. Among so many fans of Liang and Lin, I wonder how many have read this book. I have read it, and beneath its fragmented text, there is a kind of suffocating sorrow that makes one unable to even cry.

In the same era as Lin Huiyin, there were also the Four Sisters of Hefei. That Hefei no longer exists today. If one does not read, they might not know that Hefei in Anhui was once such a treasure trove of culture, nurturing such a scholarly family. The second sister among the four, Zhang Yunhe, was married to the renowned scholar Zhou Youguang, who created the Chinese Pinyin system.

Zhou Youguang published "A Collection of Picking Up Shells" at the age of 106, which is a compilation of short essays. I recommend everyone to read it—it is witty, humorous, and filled with genuine insights throughout.

One article mentioned that after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, attributed the collapse to the "three monopolies": the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's "monopoly on politics, monopoly on the economy, and monopoly on truth."

There is another section called "Superficial Reasons." It tells of a Russian historian studying the deep-seated causes of the Soviet Union's collapse, who interviewed various individuals. He asked a factory worker, and the worker said, "I don’t understand 'deep' reasons, only 'superficial' ones. It’s very simple—poverty, backwardness, brutality, and claiming to be the most advanced!"

Start by reading the works of these individuals, moving from one book to the next, and gradually you'll come to understand what "cultured" people see and write about. You'll also learn why the cultured often remain silent, while the uncultured clamor everywhere. And among these uncultured, one of them is me.

I can't write any further here.

Because once you start reading, you quickly realize that in some eras, the history of reading can become a history of crime. Let's take it easy and look at this short essay from *The Shell Collector*—"The Goose Dropping Rain":

In the winter of 1969, I accompanied my entire unit, the "Chinese Language Reform Committee," to the "May Seventh Cadre School" in Xidatan, Pingluo, Ningxia, for labor reform. There were originally about twenty labor reform stations there. More than ten units directly under the State Council, along with their family members—totaling over ten thousand people—occupied two of these stations ("Station One" and "Station Two"). Our unit was assigned to "Station Two." I worked there for two years and four months, which turned out to be beneficial for my health. My long-standing, untreatable insomnia naturally healed during that time.

During those two years and four months, the most interesting memory was encountering the "collective defecation of wild geese."

Lin Biao had died, and the leadership of the "May 7 Cadre School" ordered everyone to assemble at 5 a.m. the next day to listen to a report. In the morning, I saw that the weather was clear and sunny, and the meeting would last until noon, so it was bound to be very hot. I brought a large wide-brimmed straw hat to protect myself from the midday sun.

As it approached ten o'clock, a flock of wild geese appeared in the sky—not just a few thousand, but tens of thousands, dark and dense like a mass of storm clouds. When they flew directly above us, we heard the strange cry of their leader, and then, as if on command, they all defecated at once. Like a sudden downpour, the droppings poured down, landing precisely on the heads of the assembled "May Seventh Cadres."

I had a big straw hat to shield me, so I didn't get much dung on me. My comrades, however, looked like drenched chickens crawling out of a cesspit, covered from head to toe in goose droppings, utterly disheveled. The local villagers said they knew that geese defecated collectively, but for it to land so precisely on a crowd of people was something that only happened once in ten thousand years. We were incredibly lucky—it was a timely rain of happiness. We had all sworn never to return to our hometowns. But after Lin Biao died, we were soon ordered to go back home.

Well, we are incredibly lucky; this is a timely blessing.