When Liberia was my home, they called it sweet. Sweet was the word I remembered most during the war. When I was five, my father, two sisters and I fled from Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia, and headed north on foot among panicked masses of criers — a journey that ended in a village where we hid from flying bullets（子弹）. Every dawn, my sisters and I joined my father and covered the pages of his small journal with words. My favorite word to write was "sweet", one that had the power to numb the reality of our 6-month abandonment（抛弃）by peace and civilization.

Eventually, we were considered the lucky ones: part of the wave of refugees who left Liberia in1990 to settle in America. My mother studied at Columbia University at the time, and we made our new home in her dormitory while awaiting her graduation. My father who left early in the mornings looked for work or news of a possible return to Liberia, only to return home with nothing to give us but new words to write in notebooks. He quickly found that the education received in Liberia was not good enough for an engineering job in the United States. So he took whatever job he could find to make sure we always had food on the table and books. 

In 2011, I founded a children's book publishing company: One More Book. It provides children's literature for the children of countries with low literacy（识字）rates and underrepresented cultures by publishing culturally relevant books that have something meaningful to say to them. My hope is to give children the peace I was given through the words of my father, by allowing them to see themselves in literature. I also think it is important to provide books about foreign countries to children in the United States, to increase the overall awareness of the world outside them.

I will never be able to give my father back the twenty years he spent working to educate us, or the home and life in Liberia he lost. I repay his sacrifice（牺牲）by honoring the education he fought for and offering my art to the world, with stories that make the histories of my people come alive, and with words to live by.