Zuo Zhong, from an early age, considers his biggest strength to be finding something to like about almost everyone he meets. When his teachers and new friends realize that he that he listens, and remembers what makes them special, they look forward to spending time with him, and that's when they pay special attention to Zuo's own eager outlook on life. First you seek to understand, then you will be understood.
Six years after Chinese Revolution, Zuo was born in a village in the countryside just outside of Xian. His parents were teachers at a college before the revolution, but lost their university jobs in the city after the ascension of Mao and the People's Republic and were fortunate to work as teachers at a small middle school set up by the party in a small village.
Ten years later, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, his parents were working as professors at the medical college in Xian. His parents were sent back out to the countryside for reeducation during his teenage years, back to a small village where they were allowed to teach primary school children the basics of reading and writing. During these years, at night, his father, an English professor, and mother, a biologist, poured their energy into tutoring their son.
The Zuo family was lucky, they kept their heads down and were able to keep books around be left alone, other than attending the required political meetings and not expressing their opinions about anything political. Some of their professional friends in Xian were not so fortunate, Zuo's best childhood friend's father was stripped of his career, persecuted and beaten, and eventually ended up hanging himself from a large Sycamore tree next the the huge statue of chairman Mao out in front of the concrete administration building in front of the medical college.
What Zuo learned from his parents and the adversity of growing up in communist China was how to adapt and surive - and how to look forward to better times, which ebbed and flowed with the politics of the growing republic.
By the early 1980's, Zuo had managed to graduate from univesity in central planning, and moved into a teaching position and one of the low concrete buildings on the walled campus of the teachers college in the suburbs of southwest Xian. He was married to an intelligent and loving woman who worked as a doctor over at the medical college which was a short bicycle ride away, was father to a beautiful baby daughter, and the three of them were fortunate to live in the small two room apartment, along with his parents.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BiuIn0LmUA&feature=related
