My dad grew up in a rural part of China where subsistence farming was the only way of life in that time. As the only boy among 6 children, his family expected him to continue the glorious, or not so glorious, tradition of tending to the fields and …show more content…
Within 10 villages, there was a 12 m^2 room and 1 teacher to teach grades 1-5, not because of a lack eager pupils but rather no one saw the true value of schooling. No one knew that they could rise out of the small village and study international business relations instead of tending to the rows of viridescent soybean crop. In fact, higher education was an alien topic to most and something that most couldn't even fathom. Each day, my dad took a nearly 2 hour trek to get the meager education that he so desperately longed for. There were no textbooks. There were no individual classes. There was only that enthusiasm to learn and the immovable decision to make something out of nothing. It was that passion and determination that pushed my father to win the race to seize his education. It was that schooling that gave him the opportunity to be one of the only in his region to go to college. It was that opportunity that allowed him to become one of the greatest in his field and extend his expertise in the form of multiple