When Liberia was my home, they called it sweet. Sweet was the word I remembered the most during the war. When I was five, my father, two sisters and I fled from Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, and headed north on foot among panicked masses of criers - a journey that ended in a village where we hid from flying bullets (子弹). Every dawn, my sisters and I joined my father and covered the pages of his small journal with words. My favorite word to write was “sweet,” one that had the power to numb the reality of our 6-month abandonment by peace and civilization.

Eventually, we were considered the lucky ones: part of the wave of refugees who left Liberia in 1990 to settle in America. My mother studied at Columbia University at the time, and we made our new home in her dormitory while awaiting her graduation. My father who left early in the mornings looked for work or news of a possible return to Liberia, only to return home with nothing to give us but new words to write in notebooks. He quickly found that the education he received in Liberia was not good enough for an engineering job in the United States. So he took whatever job he could find to make sure we always had food on the table - and books.

In 2011, I founded a children’s book publishing company: One Moore Book. It provides children’s literature for the children of countries with low literacy (识字) rates and underrepresented cultures by publishing culturally relevant books that have something meaningful to say to them. My hope is to give children the peace I was given through the words of my father, by allowing them to see themselves in literature. I also think it is important to provide books about foreign countries to children in the United States, to increase the overall awareness of the world outside them.

I will never be able to give my father back the twenty years he spent working to educate us, or the home and life in Liberia he lost. I repay his sacrifice (牺牲) by honoring the education he fought for and offering my art to the world, with stories that make the histories of my people come alive, and with words to live by.

"BANG! " the door caused a reverberation(回声). It was just standing there, with father standing on one side, and me on the other side.

We were both in great anger. "Never set foot in this house again! "father stormed. With tears welling up in my eyes, I rushed ou of the flat and ran along the street.

The street lights were shining, causing rather sad feelings. I walked aimlessly.

A young father who held a child in his arms walked past me. I felt as if I saw childhood from another space: happy and carefree(无忧无虑的).

But now... I don t know whether it is because I have grown up or because dad is getting old. We differ in our ways of thinking. We are just like two people coming from two different worlds. It feels like there is an iron door between us that can never be opened.

I wandered the streets, without a destination in mind. My heart was frozen on this hot summer night. As I walked on, there were fewer and fewer people on the streets, until I had only the street lights to keep me company. When I finally reached the high-rise apartment block in which I lived, I saw that the light was still on.

I thought to myself: "Is father waiting for me, or is he still angry with me?"

In fact, it was nothing. Perhaps, dad was throwing away some of his old stamps. Perhaps thought they were useless. I never had the courage to tell him that I liked collecting stamps.

All the lights were off except father's.

Dad was always like this. Maybe he didn't know how to express himself. After shouting at me, he never showed any pity or any moments of regret. This was how he always was. He has been a leader for so long that telling everyone else what to do has become his second nature.

The light was still on. "Am I wrong?"I whispered, maybe... With the key in my hand, I was as nervous as I had ever been. At last, I decided to open the door. As soon as I opened the door, tears ran down my cheeks. I suddenly realized that the iron door that I had imagined between us did not exist at all. love-it's second to none.

I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters. There, on the borders of a creek that runs into the Yadkin River, in a cabin that was chinked with red mud, I came into the world a subject of King George the Third, in that part of his realm known as the province of North Carolina.

The cabin smelt very strongly of corn-pone and bacon, and the odor of pelts. It had two shakedowns(临时床铺), on one of which I slept under a bearskin. A rough stone chimney was raised outside, and the fireplace was as long as my father was tall. There was a crane in it, and a bake kettle; and over it great buckhorns held my father’s rifle when it was not in use. On other horns hung jerked bear’s meat and venison hams, and gourds for drinking cups, and bags of seed, and my father’s best hunting shirt; also, in a neglected corner, several articles of woman’s clothing. These once belonged to my mother. Among them was a gown of silk, of a fine, faded pattern, which I always wondered. The women at the Cross-Roads, twelve miles away, were dressed in coarse butternut wool and huge sunbonnets. But when I questioned my father on these matters he would give me no answers.

My father was—how shall I say what he was? To this day I can only surmise many things of him. He was a Scotchman born, and I know now that he had a slight Scotch accent. At the time of which I write, my early childhood, he was a frontiersman and hunter. I can see him now, with his hunting shirt and leggins (绑腿) and moccasins（莫卡辛鞋）; his powder horn, engraved with wondrous scenes; his bullet pouch and tomahawk and hunting knife. He was a tall, lean man with a strange, sad face. And he talked little except when he drank too many “horns,” as they were called in that country. These little bad behaviors of my father’s were a permanent source of wonder to me—and, I must say, of delight. They occurred only when a passing traveler who hit his fancy chanced that way, or, what was almost as rare, a neighbor. Many a winter night I have lain awake under the skins, listening to a flow of language that held me spellbound, though I understood scarce a word of it.

“Virtuous(有德行的) and vicious(罪恶的) every man must be,

Few in the extreme, but all in a degree.”

The chance neighbor or traveler was no less struck with wonder. And many the time have I heard the query, at the Cross-Roads and elsewhere, “Whar Alec Trimble got his larnin’?”