Imagine you’re a young boy living in poverty. Your family can’t afford candles. Your house has no windows that let in much light. But you’re desperate to read — to learn — to escape the life of manual labor that seems to be your only destiny. What would you do? For one boy in ancient China named Kong Xiàng, the answer was to grab a hammer and chisel and make a hole in the wall that separated his home from his neighbor’s — so he could read by the light that came through from the other side.

That single act of desperate creativity gave us the idiom 凿壁偷光 (záo bì tōu guāng), which literally means “bore a hole in the wall to steal light.” It’s one of the most celebrated stories in Chinese culture about overcoming poverty through ingenuity and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. While most Westerners have heard of Edison’s early experiments or Newton’s apple, the story of Kong Xiàng boring a hole in his wall is the Chinese equivalent of the “rags to wisdom” narrative — the idea that the circumstances of your birth don’t have to determine the limits of your knowledge.