Zhao Chunmei reads with students in the Yuedu Hall (provided by the interviewee/picture)
On August 19, the 2022 Southern Book Festival arrived as scheduled. In addition to offline book fairs and online reading activities, this Book Festival also established a Reading Promotion Award for the first time to commend outstanding reading promoters and promotion organizations in Guangdong Province.
Zhao Chunmei, a Chinese language teacher born in the 1990s, is one of the winners of the first "Southern Book Festival Reading Promotion Award". She teaches at the Central Primary School of Chuandao Town, Taishan City. The school is located in Shangchuan Island, , surrounded by mountains and facing the sea on all sides. During her seven years as a teacher, Zhao Chunmei has been committed to reading promotion work and is also the administrator of the Kawashima Pavilion of Bofu's charity "Yue Reading Pavilion".
"Reading is a ship for children on the island sailing to the ocean of knowledge. I hope I am the one who ferries the children." She said that on the island, she led the children to swim in the vast sea of books and inspired them to Reading is nourishment and leads an independent life.
Reading and Adventure on the Island
Shangchuan Island is located in the southwest of Taishan City, about 20 kilometers away from Taishan Shanzui Port. It takes half an hour by boat from the island to the port, and another hour's drive from the port to the center of Taishan. If there is a typhoon or a cold wave, the ferries between Shanshui Port and Shangchuan will be suspended, making it difficult for people on the island to travel. Zhao Chunmei came to this island in August 2018 and became a Chinese teacher at the Central Primary School in Chuandao Town. In the past four years, she lived on the island during the weekdays and only returned to her home in the city of Jiangmen every two weeks.
Zhao Chunmei was born in 1992 and is a native of Taishan . In her past impression, Shangchuan Island has beautiful scenery and is rich in seafood, making it a good place for tourism. The sea and sky are the same color, blue as far as the eye can see, the tide rises and falls, and the fine sandy beach stretches for several kilometers. But after coming here to work, the inconvenient transportation and monotonous life have become a test for young people.
Most of the students on the island grew up in fishermen's families. Shadi Harbor is one of the four major fishing ports in Guangdong, where many fishing boats gather. In addition to local people, there are also fishermen from Zhanjiang, Zhejiang and other places. When
first arrived on the island, she found that children were not very motivated to actively read paper books, and the number of books in the class was also small. So she transported two boxes of young people's books to school including "Journey to the West", "Robinson Crusoe", and Cao Wenxuan series of books. She also bought dozens of extracurricular books online and organized them for reading in the classroom. corner, ensuring that each student can have three books.
Zhao Chunmei insists on leading students in the class to do extracurricular reading after breakfast every day, and encourages students to borrow books. If she doesn’t go out on the island on weekends, she will lead students to hold reading clubs after school on Fridays, inviting the children to share their reading experiences.
The children on the island are curious about the outside world. They grew up surrounded by the sea breeze. When they were young, they often went to sea with their parents and fished on the boat. The spirit of freedom and adventure was imprinted in their hearts. What they also like to read are travel notes and adventure stories - "Robinson Crusoe", "Goose Riding", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and so on.
Reading broadens children's spiritual world and enhances their perception of reality. Some students associated the story of Robinson Crusoe's survival on a desert island with their own experience of going to sea with their parents, and wrote down the skills their parents taught them in their post-reading notes: how to strike rocks to make fire when living on a desert island, and how to find something to eat under the rocks. Shellfish, fish and shrimp.
Children have listened to the rise and fall of the tide since they were young, and are familiar with when the tide is high and when it is low. When the tide goes out, it’s time to dig for crabs and collect shells. They know where on the island they can harvest delicious fish and shrimp, which is a gift from the sea. While reading, they also shared these interesting things with their teachers.
Looking at the young and sincere faces of the children, Zhao Chunmei felt that the students were also her teachers. "I gained a lot of knowledge from them that I didn't know, and this knowledge comes from their vivid life experiences."
Using books as food
Unlike their peers living in the city, Teacher Zhao's students started studying very early. Live independently. It is difficult to fix the time when parents go overseas. Sometimes I go out during the day and go home at night, and sometimes I have to go out for three to five days.If you travel far away to Hong Kong and Macao, it will take several months or even half a year to return home. The parents are not around, and the children are taken care of by grandparents, grandparents, or other relatives.
It is more than 20 kilometers of mountain road from Shadi Fishing Port to the school. The children have lived on campus since the fourth grade and take the bus to school every Monday. When teenage students want to live independently, they will inevitably encounter various difficulties, such as not being able to wash their clothes clean and not being able to wring them out. Some children often feel lonely and uncomfortable. Zhao Chunmei often encourages students to learn from the explorers in the book and face difficulties with strength.
She inspired students to use books as nourishment and lay a warm foundation for life. During this process, she was delighted with the children's progress bit by bit. Students apply the knowledge accumulated in reading to their homework, and often come up with novel ideas that make Teacher Zhao's eyes shine. She used these compositions as models to read aloud to her class, and also guided them to publish articles in the campus special issue of "Jiangmen Daily Green Apple".
She gradually discovered that the previously silent and shy students had become cheerful and confident. "Slowly they started to talk and became cheerful and willing to share." Zhao Chunmei led the students who had just come to the school to read and guided them to get to know other students in the class through reading. "You like this book, and I also like this book, and the two people will communicate and the relationship will become closer."
Looking at the students, Zhao Chunmei will also think of herself as a child. The books she read when she was a child were all left by her cousins who were more than ten years older than her. Those vivid comic strips became the starting point for her reading. The delicate meticulous paintings and concise and charming words lead her into the ocean of books. When she reached the fifth grade of elementary school, she finally had a set of books that truly belonged to her. She begged her mother for a long time before she bought the four classics she had dreamed of for a long time from the book shopping center in Jiangmen, as well as Gorky 's trilogy.
Reading and writing inspired Zhao Chunmei during her lonely childhood. When she was a child, her parents worked in Jiangmen, leaving her in her hometown in Taishan and entrusting her to her grandmother to take care of her. When I reached junior high school, I started boarding. In elementary school, she was the Chinese class representative. Once, the teacher assigned an assignment and asked the students to imitate Zhu Ziqing's "Hurry " and write about how they felt the passage of time in their lives. Her composition was recognized and even spread around the office, with teachers praising her for her good writing. She wanted to be a teacher ever since. After
stood on the podium, she became the reading ferryman on the island. Reading is the ship that leads her students to the ocean of knowledge.
When the girl who received encouragement from the books grew up, she realized her dream and became a Chinese teacher on the island. Like her teacher, she also opens the window of reading for students and leads them to experience a fulfilling life.
Southern People Weekly reporter Ouyang Shilei
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