1. An email from a primary school teacher
After handing over the administrative post of Dean of Academic Affairs at National Taiwan University in August 2002, I decided to go back to my alma mater, Stanford, to recharge — partly to let go of years of pressure, partly to catch up on the latest developments in quantum computing. With support from the National Science Council I arrived in Palo Alto in the middle of the month and moved into a rented house. The weather in the Bay Area still carried a thread of coolness morning and evening, turning warm under the midday sun: a crisp, dry, continental climate, never muggy, never sweaty, where you wear a long-sleeved shirt even in summer. In winter the mornings and evenings are a little cold, ten to fifteen degrees below summer, but the pattern of change is much the same and there is no need for heavy furs. When I was here for my doctorate more than twenty years ago I fell in love with this climate. It really is a paradise on earth.
In the middle of December, of all things, a small typhoon blew up over the Bay Area, and wind and rain lashed the whole week — a real anomaly after so many years. What was more, my talk in Los Angeles had been set for two days of that very weekend. Friends in Los Angeles wanted to hear about my findings in qigong and exceptional human functions and had been planning it for two months; I could not turn down such warmth, so I risked the flights there and back in the storm. Early on the Monday, with the wind and rain easing a little, I opened my computer before heading to campus as usual, to work through the email that had piled up over the previous two days, and then to start my day of classes and reading papers. One message caught my attention. The subject line read "Sharing", and it was signed "a humble primary school teacher". It read:
Dear Professor Lee,
I am a primary school teacher. Eight years ago I happened to learn that you were doing research into latent human potential. So I made bold to try an experiment in "reading characters with the ear" with my class, who were in Year 5. Sure enough, something happened that astonished me. Some of the children really could read characters with the ear.
Eight years later I ran the same experiment again (about 15 minutes). This time my class were in Year 6. Again a handful of children (6-7 of them) could guess the words on the slips of paper tucked into their ears. And none of these children had ever had any training in latent human potential, yet they had the same ability. I found it quite fascinating. On an impulse I am writing to share it with you. I am sorry to take up your valuable time with this letter, and I hope you will forgive me.
With best wishes,
A humble primary school teacher
As I read, something long buried began to gather and build in me. I had waited nine years for exactly this: a letter from a primary school teacher telling me that she or he had tried it in class and found that the children really could do "finger reading" and "ear reading". I had no idea which of the many thousands of primary school teachers it would turn out to be.
Nor did I know whether such a teacher existed at all. I knew only that after Tang Yu, the first child prodigy able to "read characters with the ear", was found in Sichuan Province in mainland China in 1979, a great many primary school teachers in Sichuan tried it with their own classes, and within a year more than a thousand children were found to have a similar ability. It is a potential children are born with. Nine years earlier, the morning programme Good Morning Today on CTS had reported my first finger reading experiment, and I wondered then whether primary school teachers in Taiwan would try it with their pupils, and whether I would ever hear the results. After nine years I had all but given up hope — and then the letter came. Was it heaven taking pity on me for braving the storm two days earlier to carry its message, and rewarding me by stirring this teacher's inspiration into writing? Was it a message from an angel? Feelings I had kept down for years erupted like a volcano. I shook from head to foot, tears burst out of me, and I could not settle for the whole of that day.
2. Finding Mr Lai, the teacher willing to try
I did find the teacher in the end: Mr Lai, who taught Year 6 at Bailing Elementary School in Taipei (see Figure 1). In mid-March 2003 he brought four of his pupils to my laboratory at National Taiwan University. Three of them already had the finger reading ability, and it showed me that children are born with it. In 2016 I opened a course at the Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering at National Taiwan University called "Topics in Latent Human Potential", one activity of which was to run ear reading experiments with children at a primary school. I sought out Mr Lai again — by then he had been promoted to principal of Yixian Elementary School in Taipei. With his agreement I applied for and received approval from the university's ethics committee, and we ran ear reading experiments with one Year 5 class at Yixian over two sessions, some 2-3 hours in total. Six per cent of the children showed the ability, close to the twenty-five per cent I had seen a decade earlier with eight hours of finger reading training.
3. Age is no barrier
I had always assumed that training in finger reading or ear reading only came easily to children under 13. But when I began training the 20 to 25-year-old undergraduates and graduate students taking "Topics in Latent Human Potential", I had a delightful surprise: about three per cent of them showed the ear reading ability after an hour of training. That upended what I thought I knew. Perhaps people older still could develop it, given enough training. So I have decided that after I retire from National Taiwan University next year, I will try running classes to help ordinary people develop the ability to read characters with the ear.
