[1] Ye Jiaying, also known as Florence Yeh, was selected as one of the ten role models who won 2020 Touching China awards, a program by the CCTV.
[2]Ye Jiaying was born into a family of scholars in July 1924 in Beijing. As an expert in the study of classical Chinese literature (文学), she started her lifelong career as a literature teacher in 1945 when she graduated from Fu Jen Catholic University, which later became part of Beijing Normal University.
[3]In 1948, towards the end of the Chinese civil war, Ye and her husband moved to Taiwan. She gained popularity in Taiwan. With students speaking .highly of her teaching, she was recruited by Taiwan University, Fu Jen University and Tamkang University to teach Chinese literature.
[4]In 1966, the couple moved to the United States, where Ye first taught Chinese poetry at Michigan State University and then at Harvard University. Later, they moved to Canada and she worked as a tenured professor at the University of Columbia in Canada.
[5] Beginning in 1979, Ye began spending summers teaching at various Chinese colleges, including famous universities such as Beijing University, Nankai University and Fudan University. She offered her services for free and paid her own travel expenses (开销).She believes that her teaching is the best gift she can offer to the country and later generations.
[6] In 2013,she went back to China and worked in Nankai University. She has settled down in Tianjin since then. The university announced that Ye had donated 18.57 million yuan ($2.8 million) to the college to set up the Jiaying Scholarship.
[7]According to the speech which explained why she won the 2020 Touching China awards, Ye Jiaying devoted herself to teaching Chinese poems. She only did one thing in her life: bringing the beauty of ancient Chinese poetry to the world.
