Five hundred and eighty letters, a check Let the sad longing hide deep in the heart, Never give up, always hope, Allah says: "The Broken is My Beloved." Let your broken heart grieve! --Abir Khail, "Nobody, Son of Nobody" The typewriter was too small for Greg Mortenson's hands.He kept hitting two keys at a time and had to tear up the stationery and start over, which cost more.The $1-an-hour rental rate for the antique IBM typewriter seemed reasonable, but in five hours, he completed only four letters. Aside from the fact that the typewriter was uncomfortable to use, the main problem was that Mortenson didn't know how to write. "Dear Ms. Oprah Winfrey," he tapped on the type keys with the tip of his index finger as he began typing the fifth letter, "I am your loyal audience. I am deeply touched by your genuine concern for those in need I am writing this letter to tell you that there is a small village in Pakistan called Korfi where I want to build a primary school. Do you know that in the beautiful Himalayas, many children have no school at all. "

Then there was where he had been struggling.He didn't know whether to just say "donate money" or just ask for help.If you want to ask the other party to donate, should you mention a certain number? "I plan to build a school with five classrooms that can accommodate one hundred students in five grades." Mortenson tapped the typing keys with his index finger, "When I climbed the world's second highest mountain, K2, in Pakistan (I didn't climb Just the top of the hill), I've consulted local experts, and if you use local materials and craftsmen, you should be able to build the school for $12,000."

Then comes the hardest part, should he ask the other party to donate the full cost? "Any amount you donate is the best blessing." Mortenson decided to write this, but his fingers couldn't live up to it and knocked "blessing" blessing into bledding, so he had to tear up the letter and rewrite it. By the time Mortenson returned to the emergency room for the night shift, there were only six letters in envelopes and stamps.One was sent to Oprah, the famous talk show host, and one was sent to each of the news anchors of the four major TV stations, including Bernard Shaw, the news anchor of CNN, because he felt that the scale of CNN was no bigger than that of other TV stations. The giant is bad.Another was written impromptu to actress Susan Sarandon because of her affability and philanthropy.

Mortenson steers the "Legend of Youth" with his index finger on the steering wheel as he weaves through rush-hour traffic.This was the machine for his big hands.He stopped the car, stretched his arms and stuffed the letter into the mailbox from the other side of the window. After a whole day, such a result is not good, but it is the starting point of hope.Mortenson told himself that things would go faster, and in fact he had to, because he had set a goal of "sent five hundred letters."Driving the "Legend of Youth" to join the traffic heading west on the San Francisco Bay Bridge, he felt a little giddy, as if he had lit a fuse that was about to detonate a bunch of good news.

In the emergency room, the hours of the big night shift either passed quickly amid bloody knife wounds and bleeding abscesses; early morning.In the latter case, Mortenson either reclined in a hammock with his eyes closed, or chatted with Dr. Tom Verhan.Tall, thin, bespectacled and serious, Fohan is a chest physician and mountaineer who once climbed Aconcagua in the South American Andes, the tallest mountain outside the Asian continent.But where the two of them really hit it off was that in 1982, Verhan served as an accompanying physician for the American mountaineering team that climbed Gasherbrum II.

Fohan understands that it is already a great achievement to challenge a murderous peak like K2 and reach a height close to the summit.When they had time to chat, the two always talked about the magnificence and desolation of the Bartolo Glacier, and agreed that it was the most spectacular place on earth.Mortenson will also ask Fohan for advice on alpine pulmonary edema, the fluid-filled lungs caused by rapid ascent that has claimed the lives of countless climbers. “Mortenson was quick and calm, perfect for an emergency room job,” recalls Verhan, “but when I talked to him about medicine, his mind wasn’t focused on that. The impression he gave me was, He is dormant waiting, one day he will come back to Pakistan, he has been waiting for that day."

Mortenson's heart was indeed in the mountain village 20,000 kilometers away, but he couldn't take his eyes off a resident anesthesiologist named Marlene Willard.Whenever he meets her, he is always fascinated by electricity. "Marlena is a beauty," Mortenson said, "and she's a climber. She never wears makeup, and I can't look straight at her with her jet-black hair and full lips. Whenever I have to work with her, I was in such a state of torment, not knowing whether to ask her out or avoid her to stay sane." While raising funds, he decided not to rent an apartment to save money.Anyway, he has a private storage room, and the back seat of "Legend of Youth" is as big as a sofa, which is a good place to live compared to the tent on the Bartolo Glacier.He retained his membership in the rock climbing gym. On the one hand, he can have a place to take a shower, and on the other hand, he can practice rock climbing every day to maintain his physical fitness.Every night after dark, Mortenson drove the "Legend of Youth" through the warehouses in the lowlands of Berkeley, hoping to find a place that was dark enough and quiet enough to have a good sleep.

When he wasn't working during the day, Mortenson typed up hundreds of solicitation letters one by one and sent them to every senator.He'd even spend the day at the public library, rummaging through pop culture magazines he'd never read before, copying down the names of movie stars and pop singers, and adding them to lists he kept in Ziploc bags—that's He copied it from a book introducing the 100 richest people in the United States. "I didn't really know what I was doing," Mortenson recalled, "I just made a list of people who seemed influential or popular or important and wrote them. That I was thirty-six at the time, and I didn’t even know how to use a computer, so you can imagine how clueless I was.”

One day Mortenson went to Krishna's photocopying shop again, but unexpectedly found that the door was locked, so he had to go to the nearest photocopying shop, Lather's Photo Studio on Shattuk Road, to rent a typewriter. "I told him we didn't have a typewriter," recalls Kashiva Sayer, owner of Lasser's photo studio, "'It's 1993, why don't you get a computer?' And he told me he didn't. use a computer." Mortenson soon discovered that Saye was Pakistani and from Bahawalpur, a small village in Central Punjab province.After Sayer learned why Mortenson rented a typewriter, he let him sit in front of a Macintosh desktop computer and taught him step by step until his new friend Mortenson became a computer expert.

"I live in a village in Pakistan that doesn't have a school, so I understand how important what Mortenson is trying to do," Saye said. "His motivation is great, and it's my responsibility to help him." The computer's copy-and-paste function opened Mortenson's eyes, because in just one day, he could write 300 letters that took months to type.He worked hard under the guidance of Sayer until he completed the predetermined goal of five hundred letters.Then he made persistent efforts, racked his brains together with Sayer to make up the list of dozens of celebrities, and finally sent out a total of 580 fundraising letters.

“It was interesting,” Mortenson said, “that a guy from Pakistan helped me jump over the barrier so I could help Pakistani kids get an education.” After the letter was mailed, Mortenson returned to Sayer's shop on his sabbatical and used his newfound computer skills to write sixteen applications for foundation sponsorship to raise money for Korfy's school.When not writing letters, Mortenson and Sayer talked about women. "It was a poignant time in our lives," says Saye. "We used to talk about loneliness and love." Saye's mother helped him choose a woman in Karachi, and they got engaged. Saye is trying to save money for the wedding so she can be brought to America. Mortenson confided the secret of his obsession with Marina, and Saye advised him, helping him think of various ideas for asking her out. "Listen to me," Saye advised him, "You are not young and you need to start a family, so what are you waiting for?" Mortenson found himself tongue-tied every time he tried to ask Marina out.But when the medical center was free, he started telling her about the Karakoram and his plans for the school.Mortenson tried not to think about her beautiful eyes, lost in memory and narrative.However, whenever he recovered from the experience of rescuing Fann, the horror of getting lost in the Bartolo Glacier, or the days when he was taken care of by Haji in Korfei, when he looked up, he would always find Marina's eyes shining brightly.Finally, after Mortenson told the story for two months, Marina ended his torment and offered to ask him out. Back from Pakistan, Mortenson lived a frugal life like an ascetic.Most of the time he had breakfast at a Cambodian-owned donut shop on MacArthur Avenue, where he ordered a ninety-nine-cent special, a cup of coffee and a pancake.After breakfast, he usually stays on until evening, before going to a downtown Mexican restaurant for a $3 burrito before work. On their first date, Mortenson drove Marina to a floating seafood restaurant in Susalido, where he gritted his teeth and ordered a bottle of expensive baijiu.He threw himself into Marina's life unrestrainedly, and plunged into it regardless of his own safety.Marina has two daughters, Blige, five, and Dana, three, from a previous marriage.Mortenson quickly fell in love with the two children, as he loved their mother. While the girls were at their father's house, he and Marina would drive to Yosemite, sleep in "Legend of Youth," and spend weekends climbing peaks like Cathedral Rock.When the kids were at home, Mortenson would take them to Indian Rock in the Berkeley Mountains to admire its breathtaking natural beauty and teach them basic climbing skills. "I suddenly felt like I had a family," Mortenson said. "I realized that's what I really wanted. If the fundraising for the school went better, I'd be happier." Jaileen Mortenson has been staying at her new home in River Ray, Wisconsin, and after earning her Ph.D., she was hired as principal of Westside Elementary.She invited her son to come and do a PowerPoint presentation for the school's six hundred children. “I struggled to explain to adults why I was helping students in Pakistan,” Mortenson said, “but the kids got it right away. When they saw the pictures, they couldn’t believe it: Pakistani kids sitting Out in the freezing cold, without a teacher, but studying hard. They immediately decided to do something about it.” A month after returning to Berkeley, Mortenson received a letter from his mother.She told him in the letter that the students had spontaneously started the Penny to Pakistan campaign, and piles of pennies filled two forty-gallon trash cans.In total, they collected 62,345 coins.When he deposited the six hundred and twenty-three-forty-five-cent check from his mother in the bank, Mortenson felt lucky at last. "Kids are taking the first steps to help build schools," Mortenson said, "with 'pennies' that society deems least valuable. But in Pakistan, those 'sparks' can start a fire." .” Progress elsewhere has been rather slow.Six months after sending out the first batch of 580 letters, he finally received his first and only reply.Tom Brockau, like Mortenson, is a graduate of the University of South Dakota. Both played on the school football team and even studied under the same coach.Brokaw sent a check for one hundred dollars and a note wishing him good luck.However, successive replies from major foundations shattered Mortenson's hopes: all sixteen sponsorship proposals he sent were rejected. Mortenson showed Brokaw's letter to Dr. Tom Verhan and admitted that his fundraising had been poor.Verhan, a longtime employee of the American Himalayan Foundation, persuaded Mortenson to give the organization a try.Verhan wrote a short article on Mortenson's K2 climb and his efforts to build a school for Kerfey's children, which was published in the foundation's national newsletter. In the article, He described Sir Edmund Hillary's gift to Nepal to the foundation's members—the elite of American mountaineering. In 1954, after Sir Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay completed the feat of climbing Mount Everest for the first time in the world, he set himself a task that was even more difficult than climbing Mount Everest——for the poor Shire The Ba community built a school in return for the contribution of his alpine partners in this feat. In his 1964 book, Schoolhouses Above the Clouds, Sir Hilary spoke of his humanitarian work in Nepal and foresightedly reminded readers that the world's poorest and most remote regions - Kubu and Korphe Places like this—need their assistance. "Slow and painful though it is, we see the world accepting that the rich and technologically advanced nations have a duty to help the poor and backward," he wrote. "Not just for charity, but because only through In this way, we can hope to see a long-term peace and stability that is in line with the well-being of all mankind." In some respects, however, Sir Hillary's path has been much easier than Mortenson's.After conquering the highest mountain on earth, Hillary became one of the most famous figures in the world. When he contacted the business community and asked them to donate to build a school, these entrepreneurs rushed to support his "Himalayan school mountaineering team".For example, the "Encyclopedia of the World" signed a contract as a major sponsor and donated US$52,000 to Hillary Clinton in 1963; Sears Roebuck, which sells "Sir Hillary" brand tents and sleeping bags, not only sponsored Relevant equipment, and a special photography team was formed to shoot Sir Hillary's work documentary.After Hillary sold the European copyright and news interview rights of the film, and received an advance payment for the copyright of the mountaineering book, the funds quickly accumulated and were in place before he even arrived in Nepal. On the other hand, Mortenson not only failed to climb Mount K2, but was also penniless.And in order not to be too dependent on Marina, so as not to damage the relationship between the two, he still slept on the "Legend of Youth" most of the time, and thus became the target of police investigation.They would wake him up with flashlights, forcing him to drive bleary-eyed around the Berkeley area, looking for parking spots that the police couldn't find before the early morning. It didn't take long for Mortenson to feel that there was a money gap between him and Marina.Sleeping on the "Legend of Youth" during the mountaineering trip gradually lost its appeal to her.On a warm and cold afternoon, the two were on their way to Yosemite. She suggested to spend a little extravagance and stay at the historic Avani Hotel, which is a precious western country building that has been preserved since the Great Depression.But a weekend at Avani would cost almost all the money raised for the school so far, and Mortenson flatly said no.That weekend in a damp car was filled with simmering, saber-rattling tension. When Mortenson arrived at the hospital on a foggy and cold San Francisco summer day, Dr. Verhan handed him a torn prescription slip. "This guy saw an article about you in the Himalayan Foundation newsletter, so he called me," Verhan said. "He's a mountaineer, sort of a scientist. To be honest, he doesn't sound like he's easy to deal with. He asked me if you're one of those druggies who waste donations. But I think he's rich, so give him a call." Mortenson looked at the paper, which had "Dr. Gene Horney" written next to a Seattle phone number.He thanked Verhan, pocketed the note, and walked into the emergency room. The next day Mortenson went to the Berkeley Public Library to look up information about Dr. Hoerney.He came across hundreds of documents by accident, mostly news clippings about the semiconductor industry. Horny is a Swiss-American physicist with a degree from Cambridge University.He and a group of California scientists dubbed the "Rebellious Eight" as they escaped the laboratory of the famously ill-tempered Nobel laureate William Shockley.Hoerney later invented a circuit that led to the birth of the silicon chip in the future.While taking a shower one day, he figured out a way to stuff information into the circuit—watching the water flow through his hands, he realized that silicon crystals should also be added layer by layer in a similar way, greatly increasing the number of circuits. surface area and capacity.He called this method "planar processing" and applied for a patent. Hoerney's bad temper was as prominent as his intelligence, and every few years he changed jobs and repeatedly clashed with different business partners.During his distinguished career path, the five or six companies he founded eventually became industry leaders after he left, such as Fairchild Semiconductor, Teledyne, Intel, and so on.When Horney called Mortenson, he was seventy years old and had a personal fortune in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Horney is also a mountaineer.When he was young, he tried to climb Mount Everest, and his climbing footprints were all over the five continents.His physical strength was as tough as his mind.Once on the mountain, he survived the cold night by stuffing newspapers in his sleeping bag.Once down, he wrote a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, praising it as "the warmest paper ever written." Horney has a special affection for the Karakoram Mountains where he once stopped.He once told friends that he was overwhelmed by the breathtaking mountain scenery and the difficult life of Balti porters. Mortenson exchanged the ten dollars for quarters and used the library pay phone to call Horney's home in Seattle. "Hi, I'm Greg Mortenson, Tom Verhan gave me your number. I'm calling because—" "I know what you're up to." A voice with a French accent cut him off rudely. "If I gave you the money to build your school, you wouldn't go to some beach in Mexico smoking weed and messing with your girlfriend?" "I……" "What did you say?" "No, sir, of course not. I just want those kids to be educated." He said the English word "education" with an earnest Midwestern accent. "In the Karakoram, they really need our help, it's pretty tough." "I know," Horney said, "I was there in 1974, on the way to Bartolo." "Are you going there on a trip, or..." "Okay, how much does your school cost?" Horney asked impatiently. "I met with the architect and the contractor in Skardu and estimated the cost of all the materials," Mortenson said. "I wanted to build five rooms, four for classrooms and one for a public classroom for...  " "Give me a number!" Horney interrupted him. "Twelve thousand dollars." Mortenson was nervous, "but no matter how much you donate..." "That's all?" Hoerney asked skeptically. "Are you talking nonsense? Twelve thousand dollars is enough to build a school?" "Yes, sir," Mortenson replied, hearing his heart pounding, "I'm sure." "Your address!" Hoerney asked forcefully. "Well, how should I put it..." A week later, Mortenson opened his post office box, and inside lay an envelope containing a $12,000 check addressed to Mortenson by Horney to the Himalaya Foundation, and a note: " Don't mess it up, best. Gene Horney." "Move the first edition first!" Mortenson spent several years collecting mountaineering books published over hundreds of years at Black Oak Bookstore in Berkeley.A total of six boxes of these books, plus the rare books my father brought back from Tanzania, the buyer spent less than six hundred dollars and took them all away. While waiting for Hoerney's check to cash, Mortenson sold all his possessions.Proceeds from the sale were used to pay for air tickets and his travel expenses in Pakistan.He told Marina that he would walk the path he chose before they met until he fulfilled his promise to the Korfy children.After that, Mortenson promises, he'll work full-time, find a real place to live, stop living a casual life, and everything will be different. Mortenson took his climbing gear to Wilderness Trade, a used gear store on San Pablo Boulevard.The vast majority of his income has been spent there for the past few years.It only takes four minutes to drive from the storage room, but he feels as unforgettable as driving across the continental United States. "I feel like I am gradually leaving California to live." When he left "Wild Trade", he had nearly fifteen thousand in his pocket hundred dollars. On the morning of the flight, Mortenson drove to take Marina to work, and then came the most difficult parting: At a used car shop in Oakland, he dumped "Legend of Youth" into the garage and sold it for five hundred dollars.The gas-guzzling old car that faithfully drove him from the American Midwest to California, where he officially became a climber; when he was struggling in the fundraising quagmire, hoping to find a clue, the car used to It was his home; now the money for the car was about to send him to the other side of the world.He patted the burgundy car cover of "Legend of Youth", stuffed the money into his wallet, and then walked to the waiting taxi with a big bag on his back, ready to start the next chapter of his life.