I learned chess when I was young. By the age of eight I was an ordinary child, but through chess I knew the excitement of playing in the same primary school team as my older brother three years ahead, and soon afterwards I experienced the pride of representing my city. My love for chess offered periodic escape from my ordinary life.

By the time I was 10, my family had fallen apart. And I came to live with my grandfather. The family’s chess set was laid in the bay window. That space was soon surrounded by games collections, endgame strategy books and books on opening theory. I played out book contents on the board, typically with the left hand holding the book open, the right hand moving the pieces, and the eyes moving between book and board, as if watching a very slow tennis match of my own staging. That square metre of space changed my life. That was the place where I “got good”.

Chess achievement gave me intellectual confidence that I might otherwise not have had. Many teachers had long told me, “if you are good at chess, you should be able to do this.” I rejected this idea for years, mostly because it meant I had to try harder. Yet at 15, I decided they might be right after all. I began to love reading and learning and thinking and writing and speaking. I’d go on to Oxford, Harvard and a PhD, but there was nothing unavoidable about this development. I was not a particularly promising pupil and could have been at a loss, doing badly at school or even worse.

Aldous Huodey famously wrote that “experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you”. Our life experience is not one event after another but a series of opportunities for us to grow. With chess and then exam success, I decided to be less defined by my circumstances(境遇) and more capable of shaping them.