The first customer I received at the Obush Hill Cultural Research Center was the general manager of a company that produced straws, and that was half a month after I took office. The manager's surname was Feng. After graduating from junior high school, he lied about his age and went out to work, and through some struggle, he became a successful entrepreneur. When he first came to our company, I had not yet arrived, and it was Manager Wang who personally received him. Having been here twice, he didn't have the idea of spending money in our company to "learn".

The third time I came, I was already working for the company. That day, I was sitting in the reception room in a daze in ancient cotton and linen clothes, and Manager Feng came up directly from the stairs and came to sit opposite me with a straw in his hand. I quickly got up and bowed to him—though I didn't know who he was at the time. He held the straw in front of his eyes and stared at it for a long time.

"What color straw do you like?" he asked me suddenly.

"Red. I blurted out a reply to him.

He asked why, and I told him that red was passionate and stimulated my sucking instinct to the fullest.

"People like you love to bite straws. He shifted his gaze from the straw to my face: "Every time I drink through a straw, I always like to bite the straw in my mouth and chew it repeatedly like bubble gum. ”

"Yes, indeed. I was surprised he could have guessed so accurately: "How do you know?" ”

He smiled, put the straw next to him, and said, "Don't forget, I made a straw that can go around the earth several times when connected." ”

After talking to him, he has always felt inferior because of his academic qualifications, and most of his suppliers or his customers are college students or graduate students, except for business and professional things, it is difficult to talk to them. Every time we meet to talk about business, I always try to talk about the topic professionally, which can sometimes make the scene very embarrassing - although it does not affect the business. He told me that he felt more and more that he needed to learn knowledge, and he was told that in order to learn knowledge, he had to discipline himself, and the first thing he did was to lose his beer belly first. For this reason, he approached our company.

He said that Boss Wang told him to copy at least 500 words of the 'Four Books and Five Classics' every night, and said that the essence of traditional culture is to teach people how to calm their minds and then become self-disciplined.

I know that there are many ways to calm people down, but it is very difficult to achieve self-discipline, especially for middle-aged people who already have a big belly. I told him that it was not only by copying the contents of the "Four Books and Five Classics" that he could calm his mind, but that only by calming down could he copy the content of the "Four Books and Five Classics" of 500 words, and that it was too difficult to be self-disciplined.

He finally told me that he wanted to learn a foreign language, English was too common and a small language was not very useful, so he wanted to learn a language in between, and asked me to recommend one for him. I asked him to learn German, and he asked why, and I told him it was because I liked German, even though I didn't know anything. But if he is learning German, I can sign up for a German course with him.

After saying this, he decided that he wanted to learn German and was willing to spend money on "learning" in our company. I reported the results to Wang, who said that I had done a good job and asked the company to reimburse me for the cost of learning German.

I am responsible for supervising the homework that Boss Feng copied every night. We went to cram school between 19 and 21 in the evening to learn German. His talent for languages was not very prominent, and his learning process lagged far behind me. When I got home, I spent 40 minutes from 21:30 to 22:10 in the evening to copy the content of the 500-word "Four Books and Five Classics", and then took pictures and sent them to me on the Internet. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, I will come to the company to listen to Mr. Wang's courses, which seems serious and disciplined. In the more than half a year that I have worked at the Obush Mountain Cultural Research Company, I have received 27 clients, and only 13 have persevered to the end. Boss Feng is the most serious of the twenty-seven.

After three months of studying, I suddenly noticed that he had lost a lot of weight, his beer belly was gone, and his face always revealed a sad and vicissitudes of life in the next few days. Soon after, I didn't see him for a week, and I couldn't get through on the phone. One day, two policemen came to our company and asked about Boss Feng, and I learned that he committed suicide with a gun at home, and no one knew where the gun came from, and the gun was carrying a silencer, and no one heard the sound. The bullet went through his mouth, came out of the back of his head, bounced off the wall a few times before falling into a pair of shoes worn by his son, who had died of an illness ten years earlier.

After investigation, Boss Feng's death was determined to be a suicide. I attended his memorial service, where I met his wife, I shook hands with her, and told her that I was Xiao Lou, who was learning German with Boss Feng, and hoped that she would mourn and be strong. She didn't seem too sad, and she told me that they separated five years ago. Later, I learned from others that Boss Feng's will left half of his property to his wife, the woman I saw at his memorial service who was not very sad.

Boss Feng's suicide made me sad. He is fifteen years older than me, but his age does not discourage us, we always have a pleasant chat together, and we try to communicate in German as much as possible in our German classes. I told him that I was going to memorize Faust, and that there was a scholar in the Qing Dynasty who was fluent in eight languages and had 12 doctorates in his lifetime, and he began learning German by memorizing Faust. He asked me what Faust was, and I told him that it was a long narrative poem by the German poet Goethe.

I never asked him about the family, and he never told me. He was a rich man, but he was frugal and principled. What is certain is that at least after learning German with me and "studying" with us for a while, he was noticeably more disciplined, quitting alcohol and not staying up late, which affected his business a little, but it didn't hurt the big picture. One day after learning German, we were sitting in his car and it was raining outside, and we were waiting for a red light at an intersection.

"Lou. "Most people who like to bite straws are too persistent, which often leads to tragedy," he said. ”

I was in the passenger seat, watching the dim lights in the rain, and the wipers occasionally rubbed twice to wipe the rainwater off the windshield. I remember one time when I saw him drinking orange juice, he pointed to the straw and told me that the straw was made by them, and we were sitting in the right position at the back of the German class waiting for the teacher to come to class, and after he drank the orange juice, he took the straw in his mouth and chewed it over and over again......

"You're a nice lad. He said: "There is no bad heart, and it is very sincere to others, which is a very valuable virtue, and you will find out later." ”

It wasn't until I learned the news of his suicide that I thought what he said in the car must have been something in the words. After that, I didn't give up learning German, it seemed that the purpose of learning German at first was just to keep a client, and when the client committed suicide, I felt that it was my responsibility to learn German well.

Boss Feng was the first customer I received at the Fufu Mountain Cultural Research Center, and he was also the most successful in my business – I believe his eventual suicide was something that had been brewing for a long time – and had been brewing before he came to our company. As for the other 26 clients, including the last 12, I didn't spend much time in contact.