Yoza Suryawan, an 80-year-old Chinese Indonesian publisher, tried hard to hold his sobs when accepting the 2013 Special Book Award in Beijing.

The prize was awarded by China's General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television to honor Suryawan's persistent effort in promoting Chinese language and culture through publication and education.

No one knows more about the longing for their mother culture in time of suppression than Suryawan himself, and about how much courage and faith is required to make one move on.

"I love the land of Indonesia, but I also love the profundity of Chinese culture. So I firmly believe it's necessary for the Indonesian people to read, learn, and understand China," he says in a shaky voice, but with a gentle and confirmed tone.

A second-generation Chinese immigrant in Indonesia from the Guangdong province, Suryawan has tasted the delight of spreading Chinese culture through books as well as the hardships when his home language was prohibited from appearing in the public domain from 1965 to 1998 in Indonesia.

"The lifelong love I have for the Chinese language started from childhood days of reading little comic-strip books that the adults sneaked in from boat trips," Suryawan says.

The comic books he read were mainly based on ancient Chinese classics, whose traditional Chinese wisdom and virtue deeply inspired him.

After graduating from university, Suryawan was involved in publishing a journal and started a foundation to encourage Chinese writing in the early 1960s.

He enjoyed a rewarding and successful career until the mid-1960s, by which time he and his colleagues had published 90 Chinese books including Lu Xun's The True Story of Ah Q.

In the days of cultural suppression, Suryawan had to stop publishing Chinese books and he started a printing business instead. In the 1970s, he achieved the status of "The King of the Wall Calendar".

"I hired some of the Chinese language teachers, who were jobless because of the policy then, to work in my company," he says. "That's all I could do in those years to sustain and help them."

A book fair on Chinese books in 2000 was warmly embraced in Indonesia, helping Suryawan, who lent a hand in organizing the fair, reignite his passion in Chinese language and culture.

"It was an outburst of passion after 32 years of suppression," he recalls.

He then decided to open Chinese bookstores, and started the Mandarin Book Store, of which he is currently the president.

Suryawan was warned that the bookstores had a great risk of failing because of a limited market due to a two-generation gap in Chinese language ability in Chinese Indonesians.