I was born in a remote village in Xianyou County, Fujian Province. When I was a child, my family was poor. Both my parents are farmers, and they toiled and moiled on their small plot of land, struggling to put their four kids in school. We could barely afford books. My humble schoolbag, sewn from a thin piece of military green cloth, only contained two coursebooks: Chinese and Arithmetic.

When I was a child, my friends and I liked to play a game called "Dried Tofu"; that is, we folded the paper into a small square, just like a piece of dried tofu, and slapped it down on the ground. If one's "dried tofu," when landing, flipped over the opponent's on the ground, one won. The one who took all the "dried tofu" was the winner. With no paper, I tore off the paper from my Chinese textbook and folded it into "dried tofu" for the game. I thought I had learned all the contents by heart, so I didn't mind taking the book apart. Later, my headteacher came to my home to tell my father about it. Dad was furious and beat me with a bamboo stick. That was the first and only time I was beaten in my life. I learned the lesson well, though, that we must cherish any "printed paper," let alone books.