An “underachiever”

I was born in 1995, but my family registered the year of my birth as 1992 on my ID card to evade the One Child Policy. I was admitted to a key senior high school in our city, but then I started to slack off and skip school for fun. Neither my teachers nor my parents paid much attention to me. In my second year, I dropped out and went to work at Foxconn in Shenzhen with some students from the neighboring vocational school. It was right around the time that some factory workers were committing suicide by jumping out of buildings.

I worked at Foxconn for six months, but did not earn much money. The work there was a real challenge: There were frequent all-nighters. While at school, I could stay up all night playing video games and still have energy for my studies the next day, but staying up late to work on the assembly line was totally different. It wears down your spirits after a while, so I resigned.

Even during my school days, I showed some signs of being a delinquent: I was not satisfied with the status quo, and went into the world earlier than my peers. As for my childhood friends, some only had primary school education, some junior middle school, while some went to senior high school. Each entrance examination is a fork in the road, and each one of us chose a different direction.

After leaving Foxconn, two guys from my hometown told me they earned 3,500 RMB a month in a machinery factory in Shandong province and asked if I would like to join them. The salary was quite high, so I said yes. I packed my backpack, boarded a train, and stepped right into a pyramid scheme. The train took me to Weihai, and from there, I took a coach to Wendeng. I’m not bad with directions, and can think on my feet. While waiting for my friends to meet me, I walked around the inter-city bus station and memorized the route I’d taken to get here.