He appealed loudly to the audience, saying, "Revolution is made of hardships. We should never content ourselves with five minutes of enthusiasm. At the moment, China urgently needs three important things: (1) because 95 percent of Chinese are illiterate, we must promote education; (2) to be rich, we must promote industrial enterprises; and (3) to be strong, we must promote physical education."

In 1925 I established the first women's basketball team in China. In April 1931, I led our Liangjian women's basketball team to Japan. At the time there were already signs of a Japanese invasion of China. Sports in Japan had developed quickly, and the Japanese did well at the Olympics. But most people thought there were no sports at all in China. [...] Japanese newspapers said the whole country was shocked by the victories of the Chinese Liangjiang women's basketball team.

My school property was all taken away by the government, and I and my two children had to live in a room that measured seven square metres [...] During the Cultural Revolution, my little room was searched because people thought I had valuable things from the past. I told them that all my assets were in my school, which had been taken over by the government.

My sister died when she was seventy-five. She was five years older than I, born in a different era. She grew up before the Xinhai Revolution, therefore her ideas were kind of old-fashioned. She had bound feet and no schooling, because school for was not popular in her day. She later blamed my parents for not letting her attend school. My parents said, "At the time, nobody went to school, so how could we let you go to school?" All her life was a hardship, with too many children.