I admire my father for as long as I can remember. I loved the way he treated people with such respect and kindness.

On Sundays we usually took the bus into Manhattan, where we would do interesting things, like riding the Circle Line. He would point out every landmark and tell us the history behind it. He loved to take us on the subway to Nathan’s in Coney Island. Once there, he would give my sister and me each a five-dollar bill and then he would enjoy himself for the afternoon with his newspapers.

In 1968, we went to see the movie “Oliver”, a Charles Dickens’ classic story of a young orphan(孤儿) boy called Oliver. On the way home from the theater that afternoon he told us how he was raised in an orphanage(孤儿院) in New York after both of his parents died. He told us the nuns(修女) were wonderful to him and loved him like a mother would. As he grew older, he was placed in a few foster(寄养) families before he joined the Army.

When we were teenagers, he still took us out each weekend and he would ask us to invite specific friends to join us and he would pay for them. We often went to Yankee Stadium to watch the baseball game and he bought us tickets in the least expensive seats. To keep the cost down, he waited for us in the car where he read his newspapers and then took a nap(小睡).

He was always happy and appreciated everything he had. He loved his two little girls and later his two granddaughters. He gave so much, yet he had so little. He thought he was the richest man in the world.

Mark Twain tells a boy’s story in The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. Huck is a poor child, without a mother or home. His father drinks too much alcohol and always beats him.

Huck’s situation has freed him from the restriction of society. He explores in the woods and goes fishing. He stays out all night and does not go to school. He smokes.

Huck runs away from home. He meets Jim, a black man who has escaped from slavery(奴隶制). They travel together on a raft(木筏) made of wood down the Mississippi River.

Mark twain started writing “Huckleberry Finn” as a children’s story. But it soon became serious. The story tells about the social evil of slavery, seen through the eyes of an innocent child. Huck’s ideas about people were formed by the white society in which he lived. So, at first, he does not question slavery.Huck knows that important people believe slavery is natural, the law of God. So, he thinks it is his duty to tell Jim’s owners where to find him.

Later, Huck comes to understand that Jim is a good man. He finds he cannot carry out his plan to inform Jim’s owners of his whereabouts(下落). Instead, he decides to help Jim escape. He decides to do this, even if God punished him.

Wang Dakang is well-known in his hometown of Leshan City in Sichuan Province for his great life story. He is a model of lifelong learning. Wang, aged 86, was born in 1935. In the 1980s, he became the first person in China to finish a round trip of the country using only a bicycle. From Leshan, he rode to 29 areas between 1981 and 1984. During the 1,278 days, he traveled more than 60,000 kilometers and later was invited to write a book about his experience. However, it didn’t come out because it was too long.

In order to better write his book, Wang, who had only finished middle school, decided to continue his studies and go to university. At the age of 61, he attended Sichuan Normal University to study journalism (新闻学).

His search for knowledge did not stop there. In 2000, Wang began his graduate studies in the same university and studied travel literature. In 2008, he went to Leshan Normal University to study music and graduated in 2012. His purpose of learning had changed from writing a better book to getting more knowledge. Wang’s 560,000-word book about his trip in the 1980s finally came out in 2016.

At present, Wang lives in a village in Leshan. Every morning, he gets up at 4:30 to exercise for half an hour. His study starts at 6:00. He also keeps a diary every day. “Right now I just feel there’s not enough time every day as there is so much to learn,” Wang says. “I want to continue learning even though I’m old and I will study until the very end.”