Wang Xiaoming! Your Stupid College Antics Will Keep Me Laughing Until Graduation

“Wang Xiaoming from the computer science department at Jiangcheng University spent four years proving that you can make a style out of running pigeon-toed, fail classes with consistency, and even get three dishes wrong when picking up takeout for your roommate. His motto: ‘Can’t do anything right, but number one at messing things up.’” He barely made it into college on his entrance exam score, and the people around him are a whole crew of lovable oddballs: his musclebound roommate Zhang Wei, who memorizes vocabulary while lifting weights and strikes bodybuilding poses while coding, with more bugs than biceps; Li Xiang, an anime-obsessed shut-in who turns Operating Systems into an anime battle system and still hasn’t given up after meeting three online dates who all turned out to be nothing like their photos; and Zhao Yu, an entrepreneur who has tried selling moldy socks, expired yogurt, and ginger hair-loss remedies. Even as the dorm supervisor chases him down to confiscate his unregulated products, he still shouts, “It’s campus spirit!” Then there’s Wang Xiaoming’s old high school nemesis, Lin Xiaoyu, a top student in the Chinese department who keeps winning awards and has a talent for delivering razor-sharp put-downs. Whenever Wang Xiaoming makes a fool of himself, she finishes him off: “You’re so dumb, you could patent it.” There’s no melodramatic romance here, just campus life so real it’s suffocating: during military training, he runs pigeon-toed and gets special “one-on-one coaching” from the instructor, then runs pigeon-toed to the emergency assembly point and becomes the whole school’s laughingstock; the four roommates cook hot pot in their dorm, mistake the soup base for laundry detergent, set off the smoke alarm with the suds, and get caught by the dorm supervisor as they flee carrying the pot; during exam week, he writes key points on his arm and gets caught by the teacher, who asks, “Should I hold a class meeting for your arm?”; for his graduation project, he makes a campus navigation app that guides his thesis committee into a restroom, then stubbornly insists, “It’s a surprise route”; and in the graduation photo, he wears his gown backward and throws his cap into a tree, so the entire class climbs up to retrieve it and snaps a small branch in the process...