Chapter 2: Bad Luck (2)
The strength of the career determines the strength of the position. As the head of the household, Xu's mother naturally bears the heavy responsibility of introducing work.
It turned out that personal connections were more important than ability. Xu's mother pulled strings, and job offers came one after another, including an internship at the Hailing Daily News. Xu Wei had always admired journalists and eagerly accepted the offer. However, the newspaper's old boss liked to train newcomers, so for a month, his main tasks were pouring tea, wiping tables, and cleaning toilets. The closest he got to doing journalist work was moving equipment - just moving it, without any involvement in operating the equipment or reading instructions. Xu Wei's attitude was clear: after only a month of work, he left the newspaper with the excuse that "I'm not capable enough and can't handle the workload."
After the first job failure, Xu's mother sent Xu Wei to District No. 1 Middle School as an intern teacher. It was unclear whether Xu Wei was lucky or the school was unlucky, but Xu Wei encountered a terrible thing as soon as he started working - a male student violently beat up a female teacher in the classroom. The reason for this incident was that the male student's romantic relationship was not secretive enough and was discovered by a female teacher. Under the teacher's kind advice, the girl broke up with him. The male student couldn't understand why and thought the teacher had ruined his romance, so he violently beat her up. After the incident, the male student was taken to the school office but still refused to back down, claiming that he fought for love freedom and wanted to make an example out of it. Modern middle school students' pursuit of freedom and their tendency to take revenge made Xu Wei worry about his job safety. Moreover, Xu's father had been defeated in family struggles for many years, which he attributed to his failure in career choices. As a result, the two failures added up, and the internship ended again.
After two failed but educational experiences, it was already late March, and Xue Wei reluctantly returned to school to prepare for his graduation thesis.
As soon as he returned to school, he learned some shocking news.
A girl from the Faculty of Arts jumped into the lake.
In the university campus, there is a group of elite individuals who have achieved exceptionally good grades since their admission. The school teachers would guide them and encourage them to pursue postgraduate studies. This girl is a representative figure among these elites. During her four years in college, she spent most of her time reading books except for eating, often staying up late until one or two o'clock in the morning, risking damage to her beauty. Due to her lack of social interaction, she has very few friends, like a virgin in college, and male friends are as elusive as the legendary Penglai Island. Her only spiritual sustenance is taking the postgraduate entrance exam.
Even if someone has never gambled before, they know that the bigger the bet, the more devastating the loss. This girl, however, didn't understand this subtlety and staked everything - her youth, beauty, love, and career - on the graduate school exam; when she failed, her only spiritual support was gone, and she felt like the whole world had abandoned her. On the day the results came out, her emotions were eerily calm, not crying or making a fuss, and she even went to congratulate her classmates who had passed, behaving unlike anyone else. Afterwards, about a week later, she followed in the footsteps of Mr. Wang Guowei, wrote a farewell letter, and drowned herself in a lake.
Her will also retains Mr. Jing'an's legacy:
At twenty-two years old, I owe only one death; having gone through this great change, I will absolutely never be humiliated again.
Since entering school, I have followed in the footsteps of my predecessors, with no day passing without being anxious about studying and asking about the Tao. Knowing that my nature is dull, I hung books on ox horns, pierced my thigh with an awl, read under the stars, and used a lantern to study at night, exhausting all my energy, but still achieving nothing. This morning, the sound of the bell startled me out of my dream, and when I woke up, my head was dizzy and my eyes were blurry, with thick fog covering the sky, and everything looking vague. The white poplar trees were sorrowful in the wind, the pine and cypress trees were withered and broken, and the sound of books was like the buzzing of insects. Gradually, I felt a severe headache, my energy declining daily, and my breathing becoming more and more difficult. I feel that the time for me to return home is not far away!
The road is long and distant, I have no strength to search for it now. I am ashamed to face the elders at home, death is not worth regretting. After my death, books and belongings can be entrusted to Li and Zhang, two fellow students, to handle. Family matters will be taken care of by my older brother. Although I leave no property or money behind, with my older brother around, there's no need to worry either.
Don't explode in silence, but die in silence. The huge pressure is like Mr. Lu Xun's "iron house with no windows and impossible to break", the little girl didn't have the courage to shout out loud, chose to sink into the lake, and ended everything at once. Fortunately, a passing boy came to her rescue in time, she was lucky to be saved, but after being sent to the hospital, her mind completely lost control, every day talking to others saying she is an ancient beauty.
This girl is a victim of the current university education, and even more so, a victim of the entire educational system. Xu Wei saw her when she was in her first year of college, she looked very delicate, had good grades, and was regarded as a role model for freshmen to learn from, with many admirers, but unexpectedly ended up with such a tragic outcome.
The pressure of graduation is so great that it is a burden that students cannot bear in their lives. The dormitory building for seniors is empty and desolate every day, like a haunted house in a horror movie, and few people can be seen even during the daytime; occasionally, one or two people flash out, either young people who are tense and use online games to escape reality, or depressed and listless girls who sigh all day long. In such a situation, it is not surprising that mental problems arise.
A classic job-hunting story has been passed down through generations at Hailin University: A certain gentleman, holding his graduation certificate and resume from Hailin University, left the recruitment center with nothing after almost being squeezed to death. He got on a rickshaw to head back. The rickshaw driver asked him, "Are you this year's graduate from Hailin University?" The gentleman replied, "Yes." The driver excitedly said, "What a coincidence! I'm also an alumnus of Hailin University, class of '90!" Before the gentleman could even react, the driver pointed to an old man shining shoes on the side of the road and said, "That senior is even earlier, class of '80."
At first, Xu Wei thought of this story as a Greek myth, and was convinced that it was the product of someone's drunken fantasy. Later, as his experiences broadened, he gradually changed his mind, thinking that it was a romantic work, although it had some realistic basis, but most of it was fabricated. It wasn't until near graduation that he realized this story took a realistic route, ruthlessly exposing the miserable situation of university graduates being worse off than migrant workers. After experiencing the female student jumping into the lake incident, his thinking made a leap, and he thought that being able to smoothly become a rickshaw driver or shoemaker was already enough to achieve the "hedonism" advocated by Epicurus.
Xu Wei has been on the verge of unemployment, after experiencing multiple failures (mostly self-inflicted), and is now so poor that he only has online job searching as an option.
At this time, general portal websites will put some serious employment topics, interspersed with some terrifying news such as "College students' employment difficulties bring resumes to burn incense and worship Buddha", "Half of the waiters in the wine house are college students with a monthly salary of 700 yuan". What's more, excellent college students sell yellow discs and enter prison gates. Contemporary journalists have all learned the skills of economists who blow cowards and attract eyeballs, and when selecting manuscripts, they will choose some shocking words to achieve the realm of "language that does not surprise people is useless" as said by Du Fu.
