Message from victoriachan

[Anonymous]

It’s an incredible feat for Yang to have survived a childhood in which he nearly died from malaria and move on to be the first person with a Chinese surname to win an Olympic medal. In one of the articles, he was portrayed as having a lot of pressure put on him because of the politics at the time; Yang was a Taiwanese-Aboriginal who could not represent either Taiwan or China because of the tensions between them. I wonder if the pressures that Yang felt could also be traced back to the sense that a nation’s people are to serve the nation and highlight their strengths.
I think I would use the first article in my classroom in the event that some of my students are getting unmotivated because the story is inspirational. My students might not be Olympic-level athletes, but they face hardships in their own lives, and they could benefit to see that someone who has suffered can also gain success later on in life.