Confused about tenses

Question

Having received a Western-style school education and worked very hard to improve his writing skills, he later became a famous professional writer.

The second worked follows the past tense aspect. But it somehow sounds wrong to me.

I feel like it should be

Having received a Western-style school education and working very hard to improve his writing skills, he later became a famous professional writer.

But that doesn't seem right based on what I know about these rules.

Answer 1

I think you may be misparsing "worked" as a simple past; it is not, it is a past participle, parallel with "received".

So the meaning is "Having received a Western-style school education and [having] worked very hard ... ", which is both grammatical and idiomatic.

"Working" would be possible there - it would be parallel with "having received" - but it seems less natural to me. At the least, I would want a breath-group, and hence a comma, before "and".