In September 2001, I was in my fourth year in the Department of Chinese at Peking University. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 infoOne day, there were people standing around the TV in the cafeteria. Suddenly, someone whistled and shouted, "Lao Mei has been!"

On the TV screen, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York were billowing with smoke and dust and collapsing.

BBS is bustling. Some people say that this is "retribution" for the "accidental bombing" of the Chinese Embassy in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the United States two years ago. That year, BJ students organized a massive protest march in which the demonstrators smashed the glass of the U.S. Embassy with bricks and covered the walls with cracked graffiti left by the airstrikes of inkwells and paint bottles.

This scene always reminds me of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali – where the storm stirs in the sky, the ship overturns on the water, death runs rampant, and children gather on the seashore of the world. They cheered, jumped, frolicked.

After the "patriotic party" ended, everyone honestly gnawed on the GRE vocabulary list as thick as a brick, went to New Oriental cram school, and sent application materials for studying abroad.

In the spring and summer of the following year, the acceptance rate and scholarships of American colleges and universities to China dropped sharply, and it was once rumored that the visa rejection rate reached 99%. Whether 911 was the culprit behind my inability to get a full offer, or just a fig leaf, my 21-year life plan was interrupted.

Before that, my growth trajectory was a live-action game. There is only one road in Huashan as far as the eye can see, and on the way to the Zhumen Jinbang, he turned the red blade with his white hand and killed one person in ten steps.

Promoted to Peking University, the game enters the Hardcore mode formulated for special players. Not all of these people are "high-scoring and imbecile" guys, but there is no doubt that the vast majority of them are experienced and well-trained competitive experts - except in the Beijing-Shanghai area, a major usually recruits only two out of hundreds of thousands of candidates in a province. Take me as an example, the mock test papers I did and the reference books I used were later sold for 90 pounds of scrap.

When I first entered the school, I often had a nightmare: at the orientation meeting, the people around and around invariably turned around and said to me: Hello, I am the champion of XX Province, Bangyan, Tanhua, may I ask what are you?

In the days when the TOEFL score was still 677, according to the university's popular standards, a score of 650 or more was considered a pass. Some people press the ESC button in advance by going crazy, committing suicide, dropping out of school, etc., most likely because they wake up and suddenly find that they can no longer be the first, and may even be at the bottom.

I often hear a girl in the same dormitory building crying and giggling at night. The voice was like a man's soul spitting on its own bulky flesh.

I knew that my future resume would be cremated by my elders as a sacrifice in front of my ancestral grave, just like a copy of my university acceptance letter. Therefore, I have to make sure that every item on my resume is indisputably beautiful, from club activities to scholarships to cultural and sports competitions.

The only "stain" was that I was in a relationship with a boy from another school with a red light on six or seven homework. Every time I go to his dormitory and see 7 or 8 boys smoking, drinking, playing cards, and playing online games together, I will have a wonderful state of mind like Qianlong Weifu paying a private visit and inspecting the people's feelings. The dormitory had 8 beds, and the maximum was 5 girls on a single night. After the lights go out, the upper and lower bunks shake together, creaking and swaying, like a storm, and the sound of dark panting rises and falls, which is really unspeakably spectacular.

I often think: the so-called youth,

It's that everybody has a balloon hanging over their heads,

I don't know when it's going to explode.

It's just that other people's balloons are filled with hormones,

And the balloons of the honor students

But it is filled with a highly toxic gas called "frustration".

I often think that the so-called youth is that everyone has a balloon hanging above their head, and it is impossible to inflate to explode at any time. It's just that other people's balloons are filled with hormones, but the balloons of honor students are filled with a highly toxic gas called "frustration".

And at my school, looking around is a modern version of the chiseled wall borrowing light. Before the big exam, the dormitory corridors and toilets were full of people who studied hard. My roommate, Ajuan, is from HN Village, and her travel expenses to BJ were collected by the whole village, and the three relatives combined to make up 100 yuan. In the summer, she only had two changes of shirts and worked two jobs as a tutor.

She often carries steamed buns and pickles and spends the whole day in the classroom and library. In the notebook, on the title page of the book, and on the white paper pasted on the wall, there are densely written aphorisms such as "If you suffer hardship, you will become a superior person".

Four years later, she was admitted to a graduate school majoring in Chinese.

In any case, the life of the Chinese department is still much better than that of the foreign department. My friend Dora's major in international finance is a concentration camp for the top students in the provincial college entrance examinations. The average score of each subject in the first place is only about 6 points away from the last place, and there are forty or fifty people in the middle. The person who can get the first place just by staying up late and flipping through the books the night before the exam is her. She was the top student in our national liberal arts college entrance examination that year, setting an unprecedented high score record.

But she did not hesitate to turn down invitations to events such as the "College Entrance Examination Champion Lecture Group", although the remuneration was quite attractive - 1,000 yuan at a time, which is equivalent to 20 times the monthly living allowance for college students.

I once told her that after the college entrance examination, the whole class tore up the books in the classroom, turned on the electric fan to the highest setting, and threw the books up and twisted them into snowflakes. She laughed and said, "Oh, so you guys do the same?"

We all come from ordinary citizen families, and we all understand the truth that "one will make ten thousand bones dry". The imperial examination system is a simple, crude, low-cost universal welfare that achieves social restratification at the expense of the mind. As a vested interest, it is better to remain silent.

To be honest, the fact that her application to study abroad ended in failure gave me great relief. During that time, I used to sit in the dormitory with her and watch "Crayon Shin-chan" laughing, from the evening to the early morning. Looking back now, what comes to mind is two seriously injured patients holding oxygen cylinders and breathing heavily.

Because Dora and I both gave up on Baoyan because of the application to study abroad, I went to a media outlet in Guangzhou, and she entered a well-known accounting firm in BJ. A new assessment indicator is in front of us. One of her female classmates got an offer from a foreign bank and will be sent to work in London, with an annual salary of more than 300,000 yuan, which caused a sensation in the whole school.

On the eve of graduation, my classmates and I went on a night boat ride in Shichahai. Everyone was chanting and singing on the boat, and they went crazy until midnight. At that time, there was only one circle and one line of the BJ subway, and we did not know that the 456th Ring Road, which was to be built, would be the dividing line that would divide people into 369 and so on.

After work, Dora always works overtime, often taking a taxi home at 10 o'clock at night, and there is little peace on weekends. In her words, she's a skilled worker who spends her days dealing with financial statements, and her personal space is squeezed to the point where there is very little left. Along with her dream of studying abroad, her first love died. Once, she cried for an hour when she talked to me on the phone about the man who was far away across the ocean.

I took advantage of a business trip to see her. With only a small bedside light on in the room, she lay on the bed with a tired face and kept replying to mobile phone messages, writing E-mails to customers, or hanging on Msn to chat, seeking solace in the dewy love of the Internet. At midnight on the weekend, we turned off the lights and watched an art film called SexandLucia in the darkness with a cat in our arms.

On the screen is the clear, splendid shores of the Mediterranean. The film says that there is a hole in the beach, and if you fall down, you can go back in time and start over......

We were in a dark blue reflection, silent for a long time, as if surrounded by a thousand nights. She stared ahead intently, letting the sunlight of the other world dance on her face, her eyes empty.

Three years later, she quit her job and went to Northern Ireland to study education before working for a Swiss bank. She wondered, she said, why a person who had been proven to be the best by the education system had lost the ability and courage to choose a life.

In the same year, Ajuan fulfilled her wish since she was a child and was admitted to Peking University for a doctorate. At the class reunion, she was still the same, with a ponytail, simple like a working girl, shy and silent. Whatever I said to her was a smile.

It was also in this year that the traditional paper media ushered in the last afterglow, fell into a stormy situation, and its performance fell sharply, and the "newspaper industry cold winter theory" was on the rise. I soon discovered that the ethereal sense of superiority of going out to concert halls and art galleries, chatting and laughing with the powerful and famous, and receiving a stack of awards every year became a joke of self-deception in the face of a drastically shrinking payroll.

In the years that followed, the situation worsened, with a wave of salary cuts, layoffs, resignations, and even closures spreading across the country. Every few years, a frightening new thing bursts out, **, WeChat, self-media, App. In the chaotic Internet era, many things are breaking new ground, replacing the increasingly outdated classification labels such as academic qualifications, household registration, establishment, and professional titles. Nowadays, a graduate who has just left school may not have a lower starting salary than a migrant worker, or he may open an online store, run a self-media, or even pay live broadcast to eat, drink and Lazar, and kill the salary of a middle-aged corporate executive. In this era of "looking at faces", the number one force to change fate is no longer knowledge, technology, experience, or even connections, but the "appearance" (appearance value) amplified by the Internet.

For the first time after years in the industry, I was in danger of losing my job. The word "laid-off" that once plagued my parents now has a more beautiful saying, called "transformation and entrepreneurship". However, I still did not dare to choose to resign. I was afraid of having nothing, afraid of starting all over again, even if the school I went to and the unit I joined was known for "daring to excel". "Many classmates are not cheap, and Wuling clothes and horses are light and fat. "I gradually distanced myself from my old social circle, and for 4 or 5 years I stayed up all night indulging in online games and stopped writing.

At the end of 2010, I went on a business trip to Europe and took a day to meet Dora in Zurich. She is still a person who deals with financial statements all day long, but there is something remarkable about her: she is married, pregnant, and vegetarian. What's more, the way she looked at me, the kind of eyes that slightly frowned and smiled, was clearly unique to someone who clearly saw the direction of life.

The weather was fine and we were separated in the Church of Our Lady in the Old Town. She turned around and gently hugged me and patted me on the shoulder. She said to me, I wish you a unique writer. Her ski suit made a subtle, gentle crunch like grit between the rubbings.

On the bus from Zurich back to Lucerne, I sat in the last row and cried silently. I seem to hear the wail of that girl from college in the middle of the night again.

I quit my internet addiction and tried writing again. Life is still not improving. As a terminal patient with "superior cancer", I began to think about a ridiculous-sounding question: What if I could only be a spectator applauding on the side of the road for the rest of my life, instead of a hero applauding on the track?

Last August, I was on the operating table for the first time in my life. After I was discharged from the hospital, whenever I heard that my peers had passed away due to cancer, depression, sudden death from overwork, etc., my mood was similar to the situation described in Eileen Chang's novel: the day the heroine heard the news of President Gansidi's assassination, she was washing dishes on the sink when she heard her own voice saying, "Gansidi is dead." I'm still alive, even if I'm not washing dishes. ”

I started doing things that would be considered "useless" according to my old mindset and value system, such as practicing long-distance running, participating in charity activities, and spending more time with family and friends. I suspect that what I have been pursuing for more than 30 years is nothing more than an illusion of equality, and that I have turned a blind eye to the things that are truly equal to all human beings.

According to a 2009 survey, the actual career development of most of the top students in the college entrance examination is far from society's expectations, and most of them fail to become top talents in their respective industries.

Why do we have to be successful? What is the measure of a person's excellence? Is the so-called "success" just like Wang Shuo said, not just to make some money and be known by the stupid X? Or is it like Dora said, to change the culture, lifestyle, and values of a society?

Touching my conscience, I don't have the confidence to despise wealth. I actually want to get rich, I want to die.

As I wrote this, I suddenly realized that what my friends miss me deeply has nothing to do with their "excellence". One winter, Ajuan braved the cold wind and walked more than ten miles of mountain roads to sell corn in the town. Then I queued up for 2 hours in front of the long-distance phone booth and called a few of our roommates one by one to greet the New Year.

A few years ago, Dora kindly and solemnly recommended Mankiw's Principles of Economics to me: "After reading this book, you will see the world differently."

These experiences are so rare in today's interpersonal networks that have degenerated from "nodding friends" to "liking friends", whether it is Facebook or WeChat Moments.

I remember that on the day of parting, Dora guided me along the canal of the Limmat River, and at the end of the canal, I would see Lake Zurich.

On that day, the Limmat River was covered with golden waves, passing through the dense crowd of buildings, platforms, and squares, like a thick velvet curtain hanging on both sides, revealing a line of smoke blue that seemed to be static in the distance.

I haven't seen the Lake Zurich that belongs to me. I'm still on my way.

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