Yang Guangyuan's childhood.

Yang Guangyuan 1947 joined the China People's Liberation Army. My childhood was very difficult before I joined the army. My father took Yang Guangyuan and his younger brother from Tianjin to Dalian, which was occupied by Japanese at that time. Yang Guangyuan worked as a child laborer for the Japanese in a railway factory. Master Gao Qiao Kojiro's punching and kicking deeply branded his young mind with the humiliation of being conquered, and he began to look for his own world under the Japanese aggressors' iron hoof. He found a spiritual home among poor painters who lived by selling paintings in the streets and lanes. When I am free, I will squat there and watch others draw. When I get home, I will draw those landscape figures by memory. This is the starting point of his artistic life journey as a famous photographer and director.

1945 Japan surrendered, and after the recovery of Northeast China, he returned to his hometown in Shandong with his sick father. He clearly remembers that once his father pushed him and his younger brother out of the house, shouted, punched the carbuncle growing on his chest, squeezed out pus and sprinkled a handful of salt. His father did this in order to save money for treatment and support his two brothers. The steely character and amazing perseverance of this Shandong man influenced Yang Guangyuan's life. It was also his father's personality that changed his fate. My father has an eye for pearls, and found that Yang Guangyuan is clever and persistent, and he is a promising child. Without culture, it is impossible to bring him up, so I sent him to study under the name of Mr. He, a poor friend, and finished reading Hundred Family Names, Sage, Money, University, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects of Confucius, Shang Meng and Xia Meng in Mr. He's private school library for free.

Familiarity with these books laid a solid literary foundation for his later artistic career.