I am Deng Liangping, the founder of the audio magazine-Crazy English, and I have a partnership with Ping who started GLV. I am crazy, while he is peaceful; the cooperation between us sounds incredible and indeed surprised a lot of people. This is a long and interesting story and I’d better start from the beginning.
**********************************************************************
I am from Bayi, Nanchang, Jiangxi Province. I studied at Liantang No. 1 Middle School in Nanchang from 1980 to 1986, and majored in management in Beihang University 1986 through 1990. I was admitted into Beihang University as a management major student in 1986 and used to be the vice editor for the magazine of Beihang Youth. In 1990, I went south to work in Shenzhen. In 1992, I established the first magazine with sound and music in China, Music Heaven, which became a hit in the universities and middle schools, as did the first English magazine in China to include ausi lessons and music, Crazy English. I also set up www.Englishvod.net with Zhang Jingjun, who was the former chief of the data branch of Guangzhou Telecommunication Bureau and founder of 163 Electronic Post Office. This website has become one of the most popular English learning websites in China. At present, I am Chairman of the Board for Guangzhou TopEnglish Co., Ltd. and Englishvod Software Co., Ltd.
******
Those are the facts, but in many ways my life is like a film.
I was born in Wuxing, Bayi village on January 18th, 1969, which happened to be the first day of the twelfth lunar month when the plum blossoms came into flower.
I went to primary school at six and half years old. At the beginning, the school refused to take me in for I was younger than the threshold age, seven, which made me burst into tears. Maybe that was because my mother had been a primary school teacher and I was really eager to go to school. My mother taught me to use the abacus before I started the school and to this day I can still recite the formula for the abacus!
I was always number one in primary school and I often received top marks in math tests.
In September, 1980, I successfully got into class two of grade one in Liantang No. 1 Middle School, one of the only two advanced classes available at that time. It was remarkably difficult for a country boy like me to get into such an advanced class and it was attributed to two important people in my life.
The first one is my mother. She was an uncertified teacher in the village primary school. I incorporated a lot of good qualities from her, such as being diligent and self-disciplined and always seeking to excel. Thanks to the fact that she was a teacher, I had the privilege to read the newspaper in teachers’ office where I developed my lifelong habit of reading newspapers. I used to read People’s Daily, Reference News and the PLA Daily every day. Thus, as a third-grade primary school student I began to think in an international context. I came to know about Cambodian King-Sihanouk and the Cambodian Communist, Pol Pot, as well as many others on the world stage..
The second person I would like to extend my thanks to is Gao Yun, my principal in primary school. It was him that helped me pull some strings to get me transferred into the primary school which belonged to a chemical fertilizer factory in Liantang, for the second semester of fifth grade. Thus, I was able to attend the admission test for Liantang No.1 Middle School, rather than having to go to the middle school in Bayi. I still remember my scores for the math and Chinese tests - a total of 180.
* Junior High School: Grand Ambitions Revealed in a Diary Read by the
Head Teacher in Front of Classmates *
My father graduated from junior high in Liangtang No.1 Middle School as well. I still recall that he took me to the school by bike for registration. Everything was interesting and new for a boy from the countryside, just like Grand Liu’s first visit to Daguan Garden. At that time, Mr. Pan was my headmaster and Liu Yuehua was my headteacher.
Liantang No.1 Middle School then wasn’t open to students from the country and I was one of few who came from the countryside.. During those days, the division between the urban and rural areas was much worse than today and due to the system people fell, without question, into either rural ones or urban ones so this was a wonderful opportunity for a poor boy from the countryside.
Life in the school was very difficult given the fact that I shared a messy and dirty room with nineteen other guys and I was often bullied by higher grade students. I would take a can of pickled vegetables to the school every week and my father would deliver a bag of rice to the cafeteria of the school in exchange for rice tickets. He usually put the rice right outside of my classroom before he winked at me, indicating the rice was there again. After his departure, as soon as the class was over, I would carry the rice to the cafeteria and I would secretly trade it for rice tickets.
I started to have feelings for girls when in junior high school. The P.E. teacher was the one on whom I had a crush. In order to secure her attentions, I would cause trouble in every P.E. class, which often ended up with her grabbing me by the ear and making me stand still as a punishment, which I considered an exceptional joy!
I didn’t excel much in my studies in junior high school, though I usually managed to be among the top ten. However, I attended a contest which tested knowledge, held by the newspaper, China Youth, and won a memorial prize which impressed my head teacher. What’s more, I still remember that I wrote a diary and Head Teacher Liu read it out loud in front of all my classmates. That diary wasn’t about anything extremely important but it reflected the grand ambitions of a boy from the countryside.
Later I read some books about success and found out that, “If you have big dreams, you have to write them down and speak them out loud and clear, especially in front of the public. Thus, you can have a much higher possibility of success than keeping the dreams to yourself.”
Therefore, I am really grateful to my head teacher, for she read my grand ambitions to my classmates in a serious way, which infused me with endless energy and courage and braced me to stand up against any difficulties and dangers that would occur. “Faith is the turning point from darkness to light,” that is a sentence I got from the Bible and I have engraved it deeply in my heart. Life in junior high school was arduous but happy and I moved quickly into Class Seven, Grade Three where Luo Tianyi became my head teacher.
* Senior High School: Appreciation from Teachers is a Mighty Power *
Being exceptional has always been my core lifelong philosophy, including the period during middle school. At that time I was exceptional in the following fields: I studied in a class open exclusively to urban students, I read the many books and studied the hardest. I was the most eloquent student with the loftiest ambitions.
At the time, I became good friends with Teacher Li Zufan who worked in the school library which was not open to students. Thus, I had the privilege to borrow whatever I wanted and the sky was the limit. I still remember I had a lot of books stacked up on my desk, including many extracurricular reading materials.
My first head teacher was Luo Tianyi who favored me a lot. One afternoon, he chose some students to attend a contest with theme, “Jiangxi is a good place,” held by the school. He gave me a book and told me that the questions would come from that book. I spent all night trying hard to remember all the things in it and came home with the first prize the next day. Teacher Luo gave me overwhelming praise which made me feel very satisfied and proud of myself..
Teacher Mao Meifang was another one who appreciated me. She used to give us an extremely difficult solid geometry problems which only I solved after one whole night’s work. She didn’t stop talking about that until my sister became her student.
Teacher Mei Jiarui took the position as my Headteacher after Teacher Luo was promoted to the education bureau as a deputy director. He also favored me and offered me the only recommendation form for the Mathematical Mechanics Department in Peking University. However, I declined to fill it out for I didn’t want to become a scientist and didn’t like mathematical mechanics at all. Instead, I took the college entrance examination and was successfully admitted into the Management Department of Beihang University. Probably life would have been totally different if I had filled out that form and entered Peking University.
On the fiftieth anniversary of Liantang No.1 Middle School, my former classmates gathered and we had many a long conversation about all the ups and downs of our lives and the vicissitudes of this era.
Our cultural roots rest where we have spent our youth. Underneath the school buildings, the administration buildings and the library of Liantang No.1 Middle School lay the memories of an adolescence filled with good lessons, inspirational teachers and a boy on his way to making his dreams of excellence come true.
* University: I wrote an article, “I Am Likely to Become a Great Man.” *
Ever since I was a child, I have been sticking to three dreams: to change my destiny, to change my family’s destiny and to change the whole country’s destiny. Quite a big order, but I was determined.
When I was in the university, I wrote an article titled, “I Am Likely to Become a Great Man - and the last sentence was,’ We will see in thirty years.’”
More than fifteen years have passed since then, I have turned myself into the Chairman of the Board of a company, rather than becoming the great man I had hoped, and expected to become, in my youth. My story actually was another case in point that we sometimes get less as an adult, than what we dreamed of as a child.
Looking backwards, I have grown, from an immature child, into a founder of a company and two of my three dreams have come true, leaving the last one for me to realize. I will keeping aiming in that direction for I deeply believe that failure is the last thing to be worried about as long as you are given a shot, a chance, to try.
In 1990, Teacher Liu, who favored me a lot in junior high school, helped me get a temporary ID card when I was at the lowest point of my life. Thanks to the ID card, I was able to embark on a new life journey. I can still recall that moment when I got on the bus alone heading for Shenzhen with nine hundred RMB from the sale of three pigs. My mother stood outside, tears welling up in her eyes for she didn’t know what was waiting for her son in Shenzhen which was totally new and was far from Nanchang.
* Presently: Struggling on My Way to Becoming a Great Man *
Ever since the reform and opening-up, China has stepped into an era where many have self-esteem and confidence and no one great man is revered. This is actually a big leap forward for us, for all the people would be kowtowing towards the great man if there had been one instead of developing their own version of greatness.
My story follows the arc of the magnificent changes China has undergone. Let’s applaud the changes we’ve witnessed.
Ping and I used to be ardent young people and now have both become fathers of several children. It is our shared ambition to change the destiny of China that made us become partners.
We came to know each other at a cultural seminar and we visited the Yangming Delicate Cottage in the mountainous area of Guizhou where the respectable Confucius scholar, Jiang Qing lived. What’s more, we both joined a world religion conference in Korea. I can’t remember how many times I argued with Ping about the oriental and western cultures before we finally got along well with each other, because we had different backgrounds and needed to acknowledge and respect each other’s own points of view. When Ping established a branch school in Hangzhou I had the honor to become a shareholder of Hangzhou GLV.
If there is anything in GLV special and different from other training schools, I think it is the humanitarian concerns, the attention paid to the inner heart and spirit and the recognition of diverse cultures and its training and promotion for the staff. GLV is a great school! I often mentioned to Ping that I also wanted to study at GLV and enjoy the life in this mini-United Nations. Life can be just like a film and the story of GLV is obviously a touching and inspiring one. I’m fully convinced that GLV will continue to pursue excellence in the future.
|
