English changed his life and then that of others

Ou Wen's first encounter with English dates to the Chairman Mao era. He was 8 years old, barefoot and standing in the cold dirt of a village in Hunan province, when a cousin took an English textbook from his schoolbag and began reading from it, "I love Peking's Tian'anmen".

Ou had no idea what the words meant. His cousin, who knew several English words, seemed to possess a mysterious power. "From that moment," Ou recalled recently, "I said to myself, I must learn English." His English name, Owen, sounds exactly like his Chinese name.

This was an inconvenient ambition for a boy in rural China in the 1970s. His middle school, run by the local people's commune, did not teach English. When Ou first tried to enter high school, he failed. He was particularly bad at the one subject he most wanted to learn.

He eventually passed the entrance exam one year later. At his new school, he discovered that passing an exam and knowing English were two different things. He could memorize grammar. He could not understand what his teacher was saying.

At the time, English lessons were broadcast over the radio. A transistor receiver cost eighteen yuan ($2.68), about half his father's monthly salary. Ou calculated that there was only one way to afford it. He would stop eating breakfast.

For three months, he drank a glass of water every morning and went to school hungry. On holidays, he walked 60 kilometers home rather than spend a little more than one yuan on a bus ticket. Eventually he had enough money for the radio.

The radio eventually led him to Mike Lane, a teacher from the United States at a local college. Ou began sitting in on Mike's classes. For almost a year, he bicycled an hour each way to attend.

Mostly, he understood nothing. Then, one Thanksgiving evening in November 1985, he did. "Suddenly I wasn't translating in my head anymore," Ou said. "I was just — understanding."

By then he had graduated from a three-year technical school in "aquatic production" and was working for a fisheries administrative office in Hengyang. His job was, essentially, counting fish catches, writing reports and presumably acquiring a reasonable familiarity with the administrative life of freshwater creatures.

But English remained his private obsession. He went to the railway station to talk to foreigners. He carried vocabulary cards in his trouser pocket. He wrote English words on his palms. He began printing membership forms for something called the Hengyang English Lovers Association.

The turning point was in 1987 when Ou went to Yangshuo, the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, an international tourist site famous for its karst landscape. Ou was surprised by something else. At a fruit stall, he saw local farmers bargaining with tourists in English.

Ou had spent years trying to manufacture opportunities to speak English. In Yangshuo, the opportunities were standing in the street.

He became an English guide and later a hotel receptionist. He taught Chinese to a Danish traveler for ten yuan an hour, which struck him as a spectacular sum. Gradually, he began to understand something that textbooks had not been able to teach him: English was useful. "In Yangshuo," he said, "I saw the value of English with my own eyes."

In 1993, after several unsuccessful ventures in Hainan island, Ou founded Buckland, one of Yangshuo's first private foreign-language schools. His students were mostly rural teenagers who had failed their high-school entrance examinations. Ou recognized them immediately. They were, in various ways, the people he had once been.

His teaching method was not complicated. He wanted the students to talk. Foreign teachers were brought into classrooms. Students were sent into the streets to guide tourists. Grammar, which had once occupied so much of Ou's own education, was given less authority.

The school has expanded over the past decades. Buckland has trained nearly 1,000 foreign teachers for over 100 schools across China, and taught English to countless local people.

"Over the years, I've seen that he genuinely wants to teach those who come to China, and truly enjoys it," said Clinton Moore, a US citizen and a student of Ou, who has been living in China since 2010. "Ou has helped give me better understanding about China and its people."

"English changed my fate," Ou said. "But it also changed the fate of many others."

He paused.

"That is the part that matters."

Li Ziyu in Guilin contributed to this story.