BEIJING -- His father was a peasant and carpenter, and 44-year-old Yu Minhong
will never forget watching him collect bits of waste brick and stones and stack
them up in the small courtyard of their rural home.
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Yu Minghong,
President of New Oriental School.
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What use was all this rubble and debris? The day Yu saw his father transform
the stones into a small pen to shut in the pigs, hens and ducks, he was amazed.
At that time, his family could not afford to buy bricks.
Yu says his his father's practical determination and foresight have
influenced his whole life.
"If you have a map in your head, you can always turn stones into a building."
"If a pyramid was dismantled, it would just be a pile of stones. If you live
your life without an aim, it's just a heap of days."
Yu Minhong, or Michael Yu, epitomizes the rags to riches trajectories of
those who have been able to grasp opportunities in rapidly changing China.
He said his father's patient stone-piling lesson had influenced him at three
critical junctures of his career: he piled up days and days of hard work to
eventually secure admission to university after two failures; he made a
collection of English words so that he could become a university English
teacher; he started his own English training school. Yu's training school, which
has surfed on the obsession for studying English, has since helped hundreds of
thousands of Chinese students get into U.S. universities.
The company, New Oriental Education and Technology Group, was listed on the
New York Stock Exchange in September, the first private education company to
achieve this feat. Yu is thought to be China's richest teacher with about 2
billion yuan (250 million U.S. dollars) of assets.
"I'm not excited at the news. It's not a miracle, but a natural result of our
efforts over the past 13 years. It's just a milestone along the way. There is
still a long way to go. We have to walk straighter, for many more people are
watching us now," Yu says.
The bespectacled and smiling man enjoys encouraging students with Martin L.
King's line from his speech "I Have a Dream." He made it a credo for the New
Oriental schools.
"We will hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope." Founded in
1993, New Oriental has grown from a class of only 30 students to China's largest
private education service provider with more than three million student
enrollments.
