Tui-xiu is a two-character Chinese word. The first character [tui] means retreat, and the second [xiu] means rest. The word tui-xiu is retire or retirement in Chinese. I am a tui-xiu man. But my friends described me as a man who “has retired but is not resting."
I cannot say that they are wrong.
In my life I have been given many hats to wear, such as president, chairman, director, translator, writer and professor. But none of them is true to what I have been doing. I am actually a bridge builder. I keep building bridges of understanding and friendship between different people and cultures, between the well educated and illiterates, and between the rich and the poor.
I was born and grew up in a remote rural community by the name of Anshang Village. Poverty created numerous unhappy memories in my childhood, but it has served as a priceless legacy throughout my life. My father worked harder than anyone else in the village. He worked all year round in the fields. His favorite saying was “you harvest what you have planted.” My mother worked mostly at home from morning till night. She was always busy spinning, weaving, sewing, cooking, cleaning and taking care of their seven children. Life was unbelievably hard, but she never refused a beggar passing by. She always reminded us that “offering a mouthful food to a starving man is far better than giving him a feast when he is well fed.”
I was the only child among my brothers who was lucky enough to go to school and receive a higher education. After college graduation, I was assigned to work in the state government. I was sent down to a remote farm to receive reeducation through hard physical labor for two years during the Cultural Revolution. While working as a translator and coordinator for high-ranking official visitors, I had opportunities to meet and work for many world leaders such as President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Walter Mondale and Dr. Henry Kissinger. I also met and made lifelong friends with outstanding Americans like Helen Foster Snow, John Service and Harrison Salisbury. No matter whether destiny threw me down into Hell or blew me up into Heaven, my parents and their teachings encouraged me to live the life I have been living.
By studying the history of Sino-American relations and visiting the United States many times, I became determined to do my bit to forge peace by promoting mutual understanding and friendship between China and the United States.
I am not an educator by profession, but I am always aware of the importance of education. It is education and education alone that can change the life of our people and the future of China. In the summer of 1995 during my lecture trip to the United Sates, I heard by chance about Global Volunteers, which is headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota. At that time I began to work as their partner by hosting the organization’s service program in China.
By the summer of 2006 we had hosted 139 teams of volunteers with a total membership of over 2000 people. Each team served for either three weeks or two weeks in our communities and offered about one million hours of services to our people in all walks of life. They taught conversational English to our students and teachers at all levels. They shared their expertise with their Chinese counterparts in the fields of business management, medicine, law and education. They even donated money and helped build a much needed school and library in my childhood home village. After the completion of the school project, I worked together with American volunteers to help train people in the surrounding rural communities to be English teachers so that the kids on the farms would have an equal opportunity to get a good education.
As an English professor in college, my wife Mary Niu worked together with me on various exchange projects between the Chinese and American people. Our two children were strongly influenced by what we did. Our daughter An Lin (Annie) was equally committed. Over a four-year period, she served as the on-site coordinator for Global Volunteers' English-teaching teams to China, and her hope was to continue our work far into the future. But in November 1999, while studying in the United States, Annie died in a car accident. She was 28 years old. It is a bitter irony that she was in America to study English in order to further her goal of building bridges of friendship and understanding between the United States and China.
The loss of Annie has completely changed my life. Before her death I was not aware that life is so fragile, so short and so precious. Now I keep myself extremely busy all year round in various kinds of volunteer service in our community. Invited by the local government, I have been serving as a political leader in the Anshang Village since 2003. We have succeeded in building up a democratic and self-government system in the community. Over the last three years 1700 villagers have taken their destiny in their own hands, and as a result great changes have taken place in the village's economic and social development. Our further goal is to turn the entire farming village into a new community by the standard of productivity, well-off life, civilized lifestyle, clean and tidy appearance of village and democratic management.
I have no greater desire in the remaining years of my life than to share a better, happier and more peaceful life with my countrymen.