1 . Dorothea Dix was born in 1802 in Massachusetts. When she was 12 years old, she left her unhappy home to live with her grandmother in Boston. There Dorothea went to school and was so quick at her lessons that two years later she went back to Worcester, Massachusetts and taught in a school for little children. She was only fourteen and rather small for her age. Anyway, she proved herself a good teacher, and the children loved her and respected her. In 1821, she opened a school for girls in Boston.

Gradually, her health broke down, and she began to think that she could never work any more, but after a long rest in England, she came back to America and did something far greater than teaching. She went through the whole country where she first observed the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill. During Dorothea’s traveling for nearly two years throughout the state, and meeting similar conditions, she always spoke kindly to the ill-treated, but she spoke wrathfully to the men who ill-treated them. In January 1843, she submitted to the Massachusetts legislature (立法机关) a detailed report of her fully documented findings.

In the next 40 years Dorothea inspired legislators in 15 US states and in Canada to establish state hospitals for the mentally ill. Her continuous efforts directly affected the building of 32 institutions in the United States. When the Civil War broke out, she went straight to Washington and offered to nurse the soldiers without pay. She hired houses to keep supplies in and bought an ambulance. She gave her time, strength and money to her country.

Dorothea Dix has been called the most useful woman of America. She is an, American educator, social reformer and humanitarian whose devotion to the welfare of the mentally ill led to widespread reforms in the United States and abroad.

3 . Exhausted, Jia Ling ate five packs of chocolate cookies alone at night by her bed after wrapping up filming for her new film YOLO that day. “Recalling that moment, I felt so great, like a tired soldier claiming the spoils of war,” she said.

By then, she had lost an incredible 50 kilograms, and her entire image had changed. The chubby (胖乎乎的), round and cute comedian Jia Ling was gone, replaced by a cool, muscular warrior.

Audiences were shocked by her appearance on Chinese New Year’s Day, Feb.10, when the film was first released. Jia had kept everything so secretive, avoiding public appearances for a year, that her new look was only revealed when she appeared on the big screen. Conversations about her high-intensity weight loss training, along with her courage and determination, have become trending topics across China, propelling the film’s box office earnings.

YOLO, which stands for “you only live once,” is the theme Jia aims to tell in her new film. The story follows an overweight, depressed woman who becomes isolated from society. However, after meeting a boxing coach and taking up the sport, she begins to regain her passion and finds her way in life. The filming was divided into five stages. Jia had to gain 20 kilograms at first for the role, moving on to the final stage when she lost a significant amount of weight and became muscular. This method mirrors what some Hollywood stars, such as Christian Bale, have done, but Jia’s effort is jaw-dropping and takes it to an even more extreme level.

Yet, the film’s core goes beyond physical transformation. “This film is not about weight loss, nor is it much about boxing. It’s a film that tells the story of how a kind person finds her true self and learns to love herself,” Jia said.

4 . Mary Shelley bends over her latest creation. Although the carving is only half complete, the image of a waitress holding a plate of eggs comes out from the board. Of Shelley’s nearly seven hundred carvings, many show scenes with cows on farms and people in restaurants.

From memories to carvings

“My work is a visual diary, ” Shelley says. “The carvings describe things I have experienced and felt at different times in my life.”

Every one of her carvings tells a story. Many of the stories in Shelley’s woodcarvings come from memories of her childhood in a rural (乡村的) area outside of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Shelley’s family managed a small farm. Mary was a serious girl who spent a lot of time raising animals, exploring outdoors, and reading. Although Shelley never felt especially artistic as a child, there was always an art project in the works in the Shelley household. Her grandmother painted. Her father was a commercial artist, who drew and wrote to make a living.

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Shelley attended Cornell University and hoped to become a writer, but an unusual present took her in another direction. At age 23, she received a gift her father had made-a woodcarving of her as a girl on the farm. The gift caught her interest. After gathering boards from a building site where she worked as a carpenter, Shelley bought some tools and taught herself to carve.

Shelley soon realized that she loved the slow, thoughtful process of working with wood and painting. “A carving is like a jigsaw puzzle (拼图游戏),”   she explains. “I didn’t know how it would all fit together, but the process of solving the puzzle kept me going.”

The Shelley style

Early in her career, people hired Shelley to carve special pieces that took four or five weeks to complete. The money she received motivated her to try more complicated scenes created by carving deeper in the wood. Over time, Shelley’s art began to have its own style. In a typical Shelley woodcarving, some objects seem to reach out of the frame while others drop back, creating a feeling of depth.

5 . Whitman was one of the most original and inspiring American poets, well known for his art and his role as a poet. He devoted himself to poetry praising the native American’s experience. As America’s first epic poem, Leaves of Grass ran nine editions with more than 400 poems all written in free forms, that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. The tide implies rebirth, renewal, or green life. As Whitman once said, “Leaves of Grass was the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature — an attempt, from first to last, to put a person, a human being freely, fully and truly on record.”

For Whitman, science, democracy (民主) and spirituality (灵性) were the three things that underlay the structure of modern poetry. Whitman tried to combine the world of science, the democracy and the spiritual feeling of life into his poetry. For Whitman, the poetic form should be free. Therefore, he threw aside the traditional form and had his own form. Both the form and content of his poems are revolutionary. With its frequent use of oral language and everyday events, his poem represented a turning point in the history of American poetry — poetry fashioned out of specially American experience in a clear American idiom. Whitman’s unique poetic creation has developed a very significant tradition in American poetry.

In his poems, he celebrated new America rather than regretted it. He was against slavery, idolized (崇拜) Lincoln, supported strikes, and combined the ideal of the common people and that of the ragged individual.

Words flow through Chinese poetry

A Russian student expresses her passion for China through poetry. It seems that Anastasia Podareva, born in Ryazan, Russia, the hometown of Russian poet Sergei Yesenin (谢尔盖·叶赛宁), was destined (注定的) to follow a similar career.

Podareva, 28, loved poetry in her youth as her father would introduce her to works by great Russian poets. Growing up, he wrote many poems in both Russian and English. But when she came to China to study in 2013, the world of Chinese poetry opened up before her.

“One thing that strikes me in reading and writing Chinese poetry is the power of the language — it’s melodious (动听的) and rhythmic (有节奏的),” said Podareva.

Podareva has had colorful experiences in China over the past decade. Her most unforgettable memory is of one of her poems being turned into a song.

The poem, titled If, was written in early 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I wanted to create something positive to help boost (振奋) people’s spirits in times of difficulty,” she said. As the poem goes, “I have come to love this land, growing up with its valiant (勇敢的) people … And with the profound (深深的) love of a maiden (女子) of the north, I’d let China take my burning heart,” Podareva wrote, showing her support for her adopted (寄宿的) home.

And her message was heard. The poem was published online and picked up by a music lover named Zhu Hai in Zhejiang province, who later put it to music.

“I believe that singing is the ultimate (最好的) way of expressing Chinese poetry, because Chinese is really a language that rises, falls and flows like music,” said Podareva.

9 . Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in Bikrampur (now in present-day Bangladesh) on November 30, 1858. His father believed that it was important for him to get a good education in his native language, which is Bengali, before being sent to an English-medium school. Thus, Bose received his early education completely in Bengali. He then attended St. Xavier’s School and later college, at Calcutta, where his interest in science was developed. He graduated from University of Calcutta in 1879.

Bose wanted to take the Indian Civil Service (文官) exams but his father insisted that he should take up a more academic pursuit (学术追求). Thus he went to study medicine at the University of London, England but could not complete his studies because of his ill health. He went on to study Natural Science at Christ's College, Cambridge.

He returned to India in 1885 and began teaching physics at Presidency College. His salary (工资), however, was half of what English professors earned at the time so he refused to accept his salary for three years until the administration gave in and gave him his previous salary as well. Another way in which he was discriminated (歧视) against was being asked to do unnecessary, unimportant work and not being provided with proper research facilities and support such as equipment for conducting experiments. Bose often had to buy equipment with his own money and conducted experiments late into the night after he had finished his tough daily tasks.

Though in the face of those challenges, he made great contributions in the study of plant nervous systems. He successfully showed that plants and animals have similar responses to stimuli in London on May 10, 1901. His discovery was extremely significant but was laughed at by many of his colleagues at first. However, his contributions are now widely accepted throughout the world. Bose's another great achievement is research into wireless technology and short radio waves. IEEE named him one of the fathers of radio science.

Bose published various journals and books, and founded the Bose Institute in 1917 for research in various fields such as physics, chemistry and microbiology. He received numerous honors. He died on November 23, 1937.