A person’s dreams and feelings

Recently, Zhang Xifeng, the top student of Hengshui Middle School, gave a speech in "Super Speaker", which caused controversy among countless people. It can be said to be an uproar. . The focus of the controversy stems from the sentence "I am a native pig from the countryside, but I also want to inspire myself to conquer the cabbage in the big city." At first glance, it is indeed a bit difficult to understand.

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So, I watched his entire speech, and the overall feeling was very inspiring. For most people, who come from a poor background, studying has become the most important way, or even the only way, to escape from farming and change their destiny. This idea of ??his exists in the hearts of many people, but they have not been expressed, or they have not had the opportunity to express it on such a bright stage as "Super Speaker".

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Some people just watched the intercepted video clips and then started to attack them. They took them out of context and used them to use them to blacken Hengshui Middle School and Hengshui students. I thought this was the case. For a senior high school student, it is extremely unfair for a school.

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Before the college entrance examination in 2011, a student named Li Song from Hengshui Middle School accepted an interview with the media. Li Song in front of the camera said: "The college entrance examination is very serious. If you get one more point, you can defeat a thousand or more people in the province, so every minute is important to us."

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Ten years after his speech, Li Song became a diplomat although he failed to get into Tsinghua University, which he had hoped to win. Ten years later, he spoke again, as a diplomat stationed in the United Nations, to bless his alma mater and teachers.

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At Hengshui Middle School, more than 100 people pass the college entrance examination from Qingbei every year. It is indeed the basic goal to go to 985 and 211 colleges and universities. Among them, in terms of sources of life, there will be a phenomenon of pinching the tips and gathering good seedlings. But it is undeniable that teachers and students work hard for their ideals and goals.

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Of course, I do not fully agree with Hengshui Middle School and the way its students speak.

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Just a few weeks ago, we happened to be in the "Speech" unit, and I specially played Zhang Xifeng's video about "Youth and Dreams" to the students. Zhang Xifeng, who is still in the first year of high school, has sparkle in his eyes, a smile on his lips from time to time, and is extremely humorous. His body language is appropriate, his speech content is clear-cut, and his speech is full of style. My classmates and I were amazed at his talents and gifts.

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However, in this recent speech, the style is indeed different. It's obviously meant to be inspirational, but it comes off as a bit ferocious and cynical. Another important reason why I want to cause waves: "I am a native pig from the countryside, but I also want to inspire myself to conquer the cabbage in the big city." It is indeed inappropriate to compare oneself to a "local pig" and someone in the city to a "cabbage". Doesn’t this put people at risk who have taken root in the city through hard work? Who wants to say that he is just a "local pig"? And is someone in the city willing to call himself a "cabbage"?

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Therefore, the appropriateness of words is extremely important. Don't appear arrogant or full of gunpowder just for the sake of the effect of your speech or to achieve a certain goal.

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At this time, someone compared the "Spider Bite Anecdote" given by Chinese student He Jiang at Harvard University. The following is He Jiang's speech:

Spider bite anecdote

When I was in junior high school, a poisonous spider bit me on my right hand. I asked my mother what to do - instead of taking me to a doctor, my mother decided to use fire therapy to treat my wounds.

She wrapped several layers of cotton on my hands, sprayed white wine on the cotton, put a pair of chopsticks in my mouth, and then lit the cotton on fire. The heat gradually penetrated the cotton and began to burn my right hand. The burning pain made me want to scream, but the chopsticks in my mouth kept me from making any sound. I could only watch my hands being burned by the fire, for one minute, two minutes, until my mother put out the flames.

You see, I grew up in rural China. At that time, my village was still a traditional village similar to the pre-industrial era. When I was born, there were no cars, no telephones, no electricity, or even running water in my village. Naturally, we cannot easily obtain advanced modern medical resources. At that time, there was no suitable doctor who could help me treat my spider bite wound.

If you are here with a biological background, you may have understood the basic principle of this simple treatment method used by my mother: high heat can denature proteins, and spider venom is also a kind of protein. Such a traditional native method actually has its own theoretical basis, which is quite interesting to think about. But, as a Harvard PhD in biochemistry, I now know that there were better, less painful, and less risky treatments available when I was in junior high.

So I couldn't help but ask myself, why wasn't I able to enjoy these more advanced treatments at that time?

It has been about fifteen years since the spider bite incident. I am very happy to report to everyone here that my hand is still intact. But the question I just mentioned has stuck in my mind over the years, and I have been troubled from time to time by the unequal distribution of advanced technological knowledge in different parts of the world. Nowadays, we humans have learned how to edit human genes, and we have also studied the causes of many cancers. We can even use a beam of light to control the activity of neurons in our brains. Every year, biomedical research brings us different breakthroughs and progress - many of which are exciting and revolutionary. However, although we humans have made countless achievements in scientific research, we sometimes fail to do a satisfactory job in bringing these cutting-edge scientific research to areas of the world that need this technology most. According to World Bank data, about 12% of the world's population still lives on less than $2 a day. Malnutrition kills three million children every year. Nearly 300 million people are still affected by malaria. Around the world, we often see similar barriers to the spread of scientific knowledge caused by poverty, disease, and lack of nature. The life-saving common sense that we take for granted in modern society often fails to spread in these underdeveloped or underdeveloped areas. Therefore, in many areas of the world, people can only rely on the simple and crude method of fire therapy to treat spider bites.

While studying at Harvard, I personally realized that advanced scientific and technological knowledge can help many people in society both simply and profoundly. At the beginning of this century, bird flu was raging in many Asian countries. At that time, farmers in the villages were particularly afraid of bird flu as if they were hearing a devil cast a spell. The traditional medical methods in rural areas are also helpless against such a disease. Farmers are not very clear about the difference between the common cold and the flu, and they do not understand that the flu can be more deadly than the common cold. Moreover, most people are not aware of the fact that scientists have discovered that influenza viruses can spread across different species.

So, when I realized the background of this knowledge and the simple isolation of infected species to slow the spread of the disease, and decided to pass this knowledge to my village, my second thought Once again, I have a sense of mission as a future scientist. But this sense of mission is not just at the intellectual level. It is also an important turning point in my personal moral development and my self-understanding of my sense of responsibility as a member of the international community.

Harvard’s education teaches our students to dare to have their own dreams and to be determined to change the world. On such a special day as the graduation ceremony, we graduates here will all think about our great journeys and adventures in the future. For me, it is inevitable that I will also think of my hometown at this moment. My experience growing up taught me how important it is as a scientist to actively transfer the knowledge we have to those who urgently need it. Because using the technological knowledge we already have, we can easily help my hometown and thousands of similar villages to turn the world they live into a place that our modern society seems to take for granted. And such a thing Things are something that each of our graduates can do and are within their ability.

But the question is, are we willing to make such an effort?

More than ever, our society emphasizes science and innovation. But our society also needs to pay attention to the distribution of knowledge to those who really need it. Changing the world doesn’t mean everyone has to make a big breakthrough. Changing the world can be very simple. It could be as simple as being a communicator between different parts of the world and finding more creative ways to transfer knowledge to groups like my mother or farmers. At the same time, changing the world also means that our society, as a whole, can more clearly realize that a more balanced distribution of scientific and technological knowledge is a key link in the development of human society, and we can work together to turn this goal into reality. .

If we can do this, perhaps one day in the future, a teenager who is bitten by a poisonous spider in the countryside may not need to treat the wound with a crude method such as fire therapy, but go to a doctor for more effective treatment. Advanced medical care.

Throughout the speech, He Jiang not only described the calmness of the fire treatment after being bitten by a poisonous spider, but also made a sincere appeal for the balanced distribution of medical resources in the world. Some people say: They both came from the countryside. He Jiang's purpose in studying was because of his feelings, while Zhang Xifeng's purpose was to kill others. Some people also say: This cannot be directly compared. The difference between them is that they are separated by a world-class university.

Therefore, personal dreams and feelings are naturally different.

Here, I will not make comparisons, but talk about my own growth experience.

I was born in a very remote village in Guilin, no, it should be called the mountains. When I was in college, people from two nearby teams pooled together 500 yuan each to build a road to reach the team. The motivation for building roads at that time was "If you want to be rich, build roads first." Anyway, it's finally a place that leads to the road.

So, it wasn’t until I went to college that I really left the mountain village and had the opportunity to walk into the city.

Going to college is a wish of me and my family, not a dream. Because the opportunity that made me determined to leave the countryside is still fresh in my memory.

At that time, I was in junior high school and it was vacation. I came home around 11 o'clock in the morning. I met my mother going to weed the nearby rice fields. Of course I went with my mother.

We haven’t finished pulling the weeds until after 12 noon. My mother is a good laborer and feels that leaving some tail will delay things. We have plans for the afternoon.

The poisonous June sunshine made me feel that every inch of the skin on my face and hands was burning, and there was also the diaphragm reaction of the grain seedlings, which was excruciating.

I suddenly said to my mother: "Er Niang (Mom), I must go to college. I don't want to crawl around in the farmland all my life." My mother said: "As long as you are willing to study, I will support your study even if you sell everything."

Now it seems that I have no feelings about going to college. It is just the only way to get out of the farm.

Speaking of dreams, the most is to no longer be like my parents, who live in the sun and rain for food and clothing, harvests, and whether they are happy with the sky.

For a person who has problems with food and clothing, if you ask him to talk about his dreams and feelings, is this making him reach heaven? Of course, there is a dream, which is to have enough food and warm clothes.

To this day, I seem to have some dreams and even some feelings. Even if I am just an ordinary teacher, I still want to be a teacher who thinks I have some ideas. For example, the students I teach are not afraid of writing, but regard writing as a natural thing like eating, drinking, and sleeping.

Of course, I know this is extremely difficult and even impossible to achieve, but at least, I have such an idea and a pursuit.

So, for people like Zhang Xifeng and Zhang Xifeng, please give them more time. Who doesn’t want to be a person with dreams and feelings?