A conversation with grown-up daughter
      

    Beth rose very early that morning to dress. I watched her wear her cap and gown excitedly in front of a mirror.
    Last Wednesday was a big moment in the life of my daughter. Beth graduated from Columbia University. Her parents and her maternal grandparents travelled all the way from Beijing to New York to attend her commencement ceremony.
   “I congratulate you for getting a diploma from the School of Social Work today,” I raised a glass of wine at the Oyster Bar at the Grand Central Station that evening. “You have completed your academic study at a university which we all feel proud of, but your future life will be defined by your success in a more challenging university called Society.”
   For the first time, I had a long conversation with Beth and used experiences of my life to offer her advice to face the real world and brave the storm of the society.
 “My parents did not have money to send me to study in US. I never got a chance to wear robe when I graduated. At that time, we all wore Mao jackets. When I was at your age, I had no money. I shared a dormitory with seven other classmates,” I told daughter. 
 “I have almost broken my back in earning your tuition and paying your studio near Columbia,” I said without exaggeration. “From now on you have to live on your own.”
 “Where your hard-working spirit came from?” daughter asked.
 “I learned from father his strict moral and hard-working spirit. Father served a good example as being generous and hospitable to friends, colleagues and relatives. I learned from mother her strong spirit in unfriendly environment like during the Cultural Revolution. Mother was a great story teller about her Manchurian ancestors. Her creative art of telling stories had big influence on my journalistic career,” I said. 
 “What have been the major challenges in each of your life stages?” Daughter asked.
 “When I was in primary school, it was in the beginning of Cultural Revolution. Parents were persecuted and we lived in fear for 10 years. Father was sent to a coal mine 2,000 kilometers away in a remote southwestern mountainous province. I lived with mother and grandmother in Jiangsu province, where mother was publically shamed for her landlord family background.
 “In school, I was barred from joining the Little Red Guard and was forced to live in isolation from the rest of my schoolmates. It seemed to me that the majority of the people enjoyed seeing mother and I being humiliated. Because of this, I hate mob and fear the majority. I always spontaneously side with the minority and the weak group in political struggle and confrontation,” I said.
 “What did you do in Tiananme?” she raised a sensitive issue.
 “I was a Xinhua reporter but I was among one of the first groups of protesters. During the protests, I manage to sneak out of my office every afternoon and went to Changan Avenue and the square to show solidarity with students. That morning when I heard from an international radio that students were wounded and killed, I went to a nearby hospital to see the wounded students. Twenty years after the Tiananmen, China’s big economic success and social change demands a new thinking of China and Tiananmen.”
 “How did the years of reform and openness of the country impact you?” she asked.
 “The reform and opening to the outside world ended the political sufferings of my parents and I gained a chance to study at an elite university in China. The reform again gives evidence that the hard-working professionals, intellectuals are becoming rich much faster than the non-intellectuals and less hard-working people. But in the meantime, the gap between rich and poor is growing widening and widening,” I said.
 “What is the most significant decision you have made so far?” daughter asked.
 “In late 1994, I saw a newsletter published by the Alfred Friendly Fellowships which said that international journalists were welcome to apply for a fellowship to work with mainstream media in US. Among 200 applicants, I was selected to work as science writer with the Washington Post. I met Bob Kaiser, the managing editor of the Post, at the dinner the day I arrived in DC. It was also the first time I traveled to the US. Bob told me that I was selected for reason that he saw a story I wrote. It was a lengthy feature story about a persecuted Chinese astrophysicist. But another board member on the Alfred Friendly Fellowship Board confided to me later that I was selected as a fellow because my writings along the legendary silk roads through Central Asia and Mongolia.
 “In the summer of 1999 when I came back from the Kennedy School of Harvard, I accepted the appointment of being a journalism professor at Tsinghua University to launching the journalism program there. It was a right decision. I have been working against all odds to reform Chinese journalism education since,” I said.
 “What do you think has contributed most to your wisdom?”
 “My ability to read English literature and writings from Canterbury Tales to Russell Baker and Seymour Topping, which gave me a wise mind of looking at things and people,” I said.
  “Most Chinese are hard working but humorless,” I told daughter. ”You must learn to be light-hearted and witty to treat life no matter how difficult it is.”