My personal biggest hero – Jimmy Yen

Who do we respect and admire the most? Why our heroes, of course. What are the characteristics of a hero? The heroes are brave and self-sufficient, and are greatly admired. Being brave and self-sufficient are the characteristics that create heroes. Being admired is something that comes later.

Name a genuine hero who followed the crowd? It’s a crazy question, because heroes don’t follow the crowd. A hero may or may not lead other people, but all heroes lead themselves. Heroes are confident, independent thinkers who make courageous decisions. By devoting their full focus to their goals, Heroes leave no time or energy for worry or self-inflicted emotional suffering. Heroism is a path to joyful living as well as inspired service.

You want to be a hero, just choose one to emulate – WRONG. To be heroic, don’t emulate a hero, learn from one. Heroes follow no one, they set their own course.

At the end of this article is an exercise to consider your greatest hero and which of their qualities inspire you.

YC James (Jimmy) Yen (Yan Yangchu): (1893-1990) – Charismatic visionary, humanitarian, and educator

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. -Victor Hugo

go to the people
lives among them
learn from them
love them
serve them
plan with them
start with what they know
Build on what they have. – Jimmy Yen

A leader is most effective when people barely know he exists. When your job is done, your goal accomplished, your troops will feel like they did it themselves. -Lao Tse

My biggest personal hero is Jimmy Yen. You’ve probably never heard of Jimmy Yen, and neither have most Americans. Not that he went unacknowledged. The novelist Pearl Buck wrote the biography of him. Time magazine wrote about him and Reader’s Digest wrote about him several times, once as a featured article. In 1943, Jimmy Yen was awarded the prestigious Copernican Prize as one of 10 highly influential “modern revolutionaries”, including Albert Einstein, Orville Wright, Walt Disney, and Henry Ford. He also received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for International Understanding in 1960, and in 1983 he received the Eisenhower Medallion from the People-to-People Foundation for his “outstanding” contribution to world peace and understanding.

Jimmy Yen was a very modest man who never sought personal recognition or glory. Neither did he start with a great vision. His greatest commitments were to his wife, his strong Christian faith, and to the people around him. His immense contribution to humanity began in a very small way, and he grew, and grew, and grew exponentially.

In 1918, immediately after graduating from Yale University, Jimmy Yen became involved in World War I. He went to France as a YMCA volunteer to play some of the 180,000 Chinese peasants that the Allied Forces had brought to France to work as laborers.

While working among the Chinese workers, Jimmy discovered that these people were enthusiastic and intelligent, but universally uneducated, that is, unable even to read or write their own names. Jimmy spent many hours reading Chinese newspapers to these men and writing letters for them to send to their loved ones in China.

Jimmy wished he could teach his new friends to read and write, but there was a second reason for their illiteracy beyond poverty and the overly hierarchical class structure of rural China. Chinese is an extremely complex language that is written with tens of thousands of intricate characters, each of which represents a complete word, rather than a letter.

Even more confusing to an ordinary Chinese speaker trying to master reading and writing, the language read and written by educated Chinese at the time was Classical Chinese, which is not a written representation of conversational Chinese, but a formalized language with virtually no meaning. changes for 2000 years It was as if the only way for an Italian to learn to read and write was to learn to read and write in Latin.

Despite the perceived great difficulties and mediocre success that other YMCA volunteers had had in teaching workers to read and write classical Chinese, Jimmy still envisioned workers reading their own newspapers and writing their own letters home.

While looking at the correspondence he was writing, Jimmy was struck by how often a very small number of characters (words) were repeated. Inspired genius struck and Jimmy selected 1,000 characters that he believed could communicate virtually any idea.

Putting flesh on the bones of inspiration, Jimmy made the decision to teach Vernacular Chinese (Baihua) script, a written representation of spoken Chinese, rather than Classical Chinese. Although there was an effort to promote Baihua in China for several years, it had not gained momentum and Baihua was hardly used.

Jimmy offered to teach the workers to read and write using his 1000 Character System. 40 of the 5,000 men in his camp accepted his offer. The training was so successful that many more wanted to join the next class.

Soon almost every worker in that camp was writing their own letters home and reading a newsletter that Jimmy had printed for them in 1,000 Baihua characters. Word spread quickly, and other volunteers began teaching Jimmy’s 1,000-character system in Chinese labor camps in France.

Jimmy then made a vow to return to his birth country and educate everyone in rural China.

Jimmy returned to the United States, completed a master’s program at Princeton, obtained financial support from the YMCA-In-China program to launch a Chinese literacy program, and sailed for China with his new wife Alice, who would become his companion. for life. she and she committed collaborator in the Literacy and Rural Reconstruction movements.

In 1923, Jimmy established the Chinese Mass Education Movement and launched what quickly became a national program to teach 1000 Character literacy.

In 1926, Jimmy expanded his work to address the four interlocking problems of ignorance, poverty, disease, and civic inertia, with an integrated rural reconstruction program of education, livelihood, health, and self-governance: “integrated rural development, people-centered and sustainable. “In his words.

In 1928, John D. Rockefeller Jr. made a great personal contribution to Jimmy’s work and inspired many other Americans to do the same.

With the start of World War II, Jimmy returned to the United States to raise funds for the reconstruction of China. Jimmy made powerful friends in America, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Ford, and in 1948 he secured funds for postwar reconstruction through the “Jimmy Yen Provision” of the China Aid Act.

In 1950, when the incoming communist government stopped their work in China, Jimmy and Alice turned their attention to the world, working with rural reconstruction in the Philippines, Thailand, India, Ghana, Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, and Cuba.

In 1960, Jimmy founded the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction in the Philippines.

In 1985, the Chinese government finally welcomed Jimmy back to China and recognized his immense contribution to mass education and rural reconstruction in China.

Today, the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR), a global organization based in the Philippines, continues the work started by Jimmy and Alice Yen and serves as a living memorial of their work.

Beginning with a desire to teach a few simple workers to read and write, Jimmy Yen’s life unfolded over more than 70 years of service to directly benefit tens of millions of people around the world.

Best of all for me personally is that Jimmy Yen is my uncle. In 1921, Uncle Jimmy married Alice Huie, my aunt and the daughter of my grandfather, Reverend Huie Kin, pastor of the First Chinese Presbyterian Church in New York City.

To me, Jimmy Yen represents the ultimate in selfless and inspired service. Day after day, he did his best to take one small step closer to what he believed in. His commitment and enthusiasm were so contagious that people all over the world were inspired by his vision.

Exercise: Who is my biggest personal hero? Take a pencil and paper. Write why I admire my greatest hero and which of his qualities I want to emulate in my own life.