Chapter 12 Genius is educated

My parents don't think I'm a genius, but they believe that geniuses come from education. ——Zhang Yizhao When describing all this, Zhang Yizhao's tone was gentle and his face was calm.He has an introverted personality, and it is a bit difficult to speak Mandarin, but you can still feel that there is a huge emotional wave coming out of his words: "If you think about it, a woman takes four children across the ocean and settles in a completely foreign land; Changed my life, changed this family. For what? Just to let the children learn. I know that my parents always wanted me to be outstanding.In fact, my talent is the same as that of other children. I was thin and weak since I was a child, and my physical development may not be as good as other children. What I eat, play, and think are no different from other children.My parents don't think I'm a genius, but they believe that geniuses come from education.So they refused to give me any pocket money, but they were willing to spend a lot of money and energy on my education.More importantly, they know that a good educational environment and educational culture are more important than money, so my mother brought all our brothers and sisters to the United States to study.Now, more than twenty years have passed since this incident, but the more time passes, the more I feel that they made this decision in the first place, it was really amazing. "

Yizhao’s ancestral home was in Fujian, but he himself was born in Taiwan. His path to study was exactly the same as that of Kaifu: he spent his childhood in Taipei, moved to the United States at the age of 11, and has been studying in the United States since then, junior high school, high school, and undergraduate. MIT completes bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. Twenty years ago, Taiwan's education was a bit like today's mainland.There are clear distinctions between primary and secondary schools, both good and bad.Children reach school age, usually at the school closest to home.Whichever district you live in, you can go to a public elementary school in that district without paying tuition fees.Just like parents on this side of the Taiwan Strait, parents in Taiwan also value education and believe that children's growth follows a certain route: from a good elementary school to a good junior high school, then to a good high school, and finally to a good university.Therefore, the first condition for many families to buy a house is whether the nearby schools are good or not. "Buying a house" is to "buy a school", and it has become common practice for a while.In this way, those neighborhoods with good elementary schools, housing prices skyrocketed.This situation is a bit like the United States. The same house is in a good school district or a bad school district, and the price difference is more than double.

If you think the public school at your doorstep is not good and you don’t want to enroll nearby, you can also choose a private school.Private schools usually have good teachers, higher teaching quality and better facilities, but the fees are also high, so most of them are built in areas where rich people live. Zhang's family lives in Shilin, which has a very good private primary school, most of which are children from rich families, and Yizhao is one of them. Among the 30 "Microsoft kids" we studied, Yizhao was the only kid from a wealthy family.But strictly speaking, the Zhang family belongs to the upper middle class in Taipei, not a wealthy family.There are many families richer than the Zhang family, but they refuse to send their children to private schools.There are also some families who are not rich, but give their children a lot of pocket money every day.The uniqueness of the Zhang family is that parents have their own views on the growth of their children. They do not allow their children to have any extravagance in daily expenses, such as seldom giving them pocket money or buying toys, but they are very concerned about their children’s education. Willing to take out all his savings for his children to go to the best schools.

"My parents' request for me is probably to study." Yizhao said later. My father was a businessman and my mother was a teacher, both of whom were college graduates, a rarity in that generation.There is an old Chinese saying: "Loyalty is handed down to the family for a long time, and poems and books will last forever." People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait believe it and like to post it on both sides of the house door.From the continuation of the previous generations, the Zhang family is also a scholarly family. It has always had a tradition of reading. The great-grandfather was a scholar, and the grandfather was a doctor. The family motto from generation to generation continued to his father, and then passed on to Yizhao: Important, knowledge is the most important. Things outside the body are not important, what is in the mind is the most important.”

Education in the school follows a traditional approach.There are about 50 students in a class. They go to and from get out of class every day, step by step, do a lot of exercises, and then recite a passage of text.Chinese people have memorized this kind of textbook for thousands of years, grandpa and father, and now it is Yizhao's turn to memorize it.The teachers all said that learning Chinese characters is all about leaning back, and their eyes shine when they see a student with a good memory.Yizhao still remembers how bright the teacher's smile was on him when he fluently recited the "Nine-Nine Multiplication Table" in class.This made Yizhao keep guessing in his mind at a very young age: "Learning is probably about absorbing knowledge, and a good student must keep all the knowledge in his head."

Teachers evaluate students in various ways, which are exactly the same as those in mainland China: endless test papers, unified scoring standards, transcripts, rankings, awarding certificates to the top few, and counting down the bottom few.The difference between a good student and a poor student is entirely in the score. Even if you are only 0.1 points behind, you may fall behind by a lot. Yizhao grew up in such an environment, thinking that the school should be like this. It was not until he came to the United States that he realized that it was a Chinese-style education. "There is no such method in the United States."

Sending the children to study in the United States is the most important decision the family has made so far. Taiwan in 1979 was a bit strange. Although the former US President Nixon’s visit to China made the relationship between the United States and Taiwan colder than ever before, and the current President Carter cut off “diplomatic relations” between the United States and Taiwan on the first day of the year, but People in Taiwan seem to pay more attention to the United States.A new folk song became popular at that time: "Come, come, come to National Taiwan University, go, go, go to the United States."

Every family is talking about the possibility of sending their children to study in the United States, which has become a trend and a topic of conversation for the Zhang family. Like Kaifu's mother, Yizhao's mother believed that the United States was a great country: if the children were to be successful, they had to be sent there. "Anyway, I'm going to study in the United States after graduating from college," my father said, "it's better to go there earlier." The mother agreed with the father, and her only concern was that the child was too young to live independently.

So my mother resigned from her job as a teacher, took her five children to the other side of the ocean, and lived with her uncle in California.The father stayed in Taiwan and continued to earn money to support the children's study and life in the United States. Yizhao was 11 years old that year, coincidentally the same age as Kai Fu when he left Taiwan for America. Therefore, if you want to stand on the starting line of "E-students", you need to have the ninth concept: have money to spend on education.