We are overjoyed at your generously long letter. We have been rather worried about you since your reticent Xmas card from Spain. We thought that your indignation at Fascist (Natsi) terrors might have made you join the Spanish Republican army on leaving Oxford. In that case, the world would certainly gain a hero, but we might (O horrible thought!) lose a friend. You can imagine our relief to hear from you again.

We shall be here for another four or five months yet, and we shall sail home in September. Not that we have homes to return to! Our houses, spared by the shell-fire, have been looted and gutted of all their valuable contents. Our families have taken refuge in mountains. My wife lost her mother, and I myself have no hope of getting jobs in China. However, one’s own people; I don’t mind suffering a bit. The revolution of the Fortune’s wheel might bring us up, and, as Goethe (歌德，著名诗人) was fond of saying, abwarten Sie.

Yes, Stuart, I have been working entirely on my own. I have tried to read French literature systematically downwards, beginning with Villon, and already got as far as the mid-nineteenth century. I have also read the German romantics. I am reading Taine’s novel. Besides, I have not neglected my English and Chinese studies.

Oh, my baby daughter is bursting fat. She already boasts of six teeth (each tooth meaning a week or so of worries and sleeplessness on her part as well as our own). She is very naughty and self-willed. She will be able to walk a little next month.

My wife sends you her best wishes. Write to me at your earliest convenience.

Yours ever,

Chung-shu Tchi’ien

“A bird with a broken wing will never fly as high. ” I’m sure T. J,   Ware was made to feel this way almost every day in school.

By high school, T, J. was the most celebrated troublemaker in his town. Teachers literally cringed when they saw his name posted on their classroom lists.

I met T. J. for the first time when all the students at school were attending ACE training.   At first, he showed no interest in the discussion.   But slowly, the interactive games drew him in.   T. J.   had some brilliant thoughts on those situations, which were welcomed by his group.   By the end of the activity, the other students on the team were impressed with his concern and ideas and elected T. J.   co-chairman of the team.

When T. J. showed up at school on Monday morning, a group of teachers were expressing their disagreements to the school principal about his being elected co-chairman. The principal reminded them that the purpose of the program was to uncover any positive feeling and strengthen its practice until true change can take place. The teachers left the meeting, firmly convinced that failure was unavoidable.

Two weeks later, T. J.   and his friends led a group of 70 students to collect food   They collected a school record: 2,854 cans of food in just two hours.   The local newspaper covered the event with a full-page article the next day. That newspaper story was posted on the main bulletin board at school, where everyone could see it.   

T. J. ,s picture was up there for doing something great.

T. J. started showing up at school every day and answered questions from teachers for the first time.   The event he started now yields 9,000 cans of food in one day, taking care of 70 percent of the need for food for one year.

T, J. reminds us that a bird with a broken wing only needs mending.   But once it has healed, it can fly higher than the rest.   T. J.   got a job.   He became productive.   He is flying quite nicely these days.

MEGHAN YOUNG is a professional Instagram star. She gets paid to climb beautiful mountains, photograph their glittering (闪闪发光的) summits and post about her adventures to her fans.

Young graduated from Seattle University’s school of Law in 2015. But she decided she didn’t want to become a lawyer. Her parents were shocked by the decision. “They were worried about what I was going to do,” Young says. “How was I going to find career stability?”

But her legal skills haven’t gone to waste. Once companies express an interest in working with her, there’s the tough task of negotiating the terms (条款) of the deal. And the work is still unfinished even after she’s done take the photos. When Young returns from her adventures, she carefully edits the images and writes captions to go along with them. Once the posts are public, businesses sometimes don’t pay on time. That's when she needs to follow up. Her least favorite problem is when she discovers that a company has used her photos in a way that violates the terms of the contract.That usually leads to time-consuming email exchanges.

Social media influencing is not as effortless as it seems. The stress it creates even has its own name: creator burnout (精疲力竭) . Young used to obsessively check her post’s performance, which she says will “drive you crazy”, so she stopped. But if she doesn’t reply, people will stop commenting.Without that engagement on her posts, brands won’t want to keep paying her. Therefore, she had to accept the fact that she’ll be tethered (拴住) to her phone as long as she’s in this line of work.

Beyond the day-to- day headaches of a career online, social media’s inherent (固有的) uncertainly also poses problems for creators. There are times when Young is staring at the calendar without another project in the works. In the long term, it can be risky to focus a career on a single platform, or even on social media itself.

Yet Young says it’s all been worth it, because the sponsorship allow her to spend much of her life in the mountains. Her ideal day starts with unzipping her tent at dawn so she can take pictures of the sunrise reflecting on snowy summits around her. Few jobs in the world would allow her to do that so consistently (一贯地) .