World Children's Story Classics: Family Stories

Chapter 7
"New Book of Tang·Li He Biography" tells such a story:
In the mid-Tang Dynasty, there was a poet named Li He. He was clever and fond of reading since he was a child. His father died of illness in middle age, and he lived a poor life with his mother and younger siblings.Li He likes to compose poems and essays, and is often intoxicated by them. Regardless of physical fatigue, he works tirelessly.Unlike ordinary literati, he first set up a topic according to a fixed pattern, but accumulated materials through inspections, interviews, and travels, and then planned and created the layout of the article.He often rides on the only little donkey in the family, carries a book bag on his back, and takes a little book boy around to interview and investigate, collect songs and folklore, and when he encounters good materials, he immediately writes them down and puts them in the book bag. Then organize into articles.His mother was very pleased to see the child's lofty aspirations and diligent creation.But at the same time, I was worried about his weak and sickly physique since he was a child, fearing that he would be overworked.Therefore, every day when Li He came home, his mother had to check the book bag herself, and found that the book bag was very heavy, and the mother's heart became heavy, and she scolded her son distressedly: "You child, if you continue like this, do you have to vomit all your hard work?" Do you want to stop?" Li He hurriedly comforted his mother, but afterwards he continued to write infatuatedly as before.Later, Li He really had an outstanding poetic talent, became a school of his own in the poetry circle, and wrote many excellent works handed down from generation to generation. Unfortunately, he failed in his ambitions and died of poverty and illness at the age of 27.

Later, people often used the idiom "pain and painstaking" to describe doing things with painstaking efforts.

(End of this chapter)